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IHiJiJwiiftfi Taylor Fairbanks 



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Class^ __ 

C 1 \ A 
Book._ 1 



Copyright If. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT: 



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TWELVE DISCOURSES 



Given in the South Church 
st. johnsbury, vermont 

by 

\ 

Edward Taylor Fairbanks 

Twenty-eight Years Pastor 
1874 I902 



Published by W. W. Husband 






St. Johnsbury, Vermont 

grpss of GJfo QJakoommt GJompattg 

1902 



CONGRESS, 

Two COWfcS RbOWVSB 

nrc. 22. 1962 

CnwwwHT wmir 
COPY B. I 



Copyright, 1902 
By W. W. Husband 



0,33 



Table of Contents. 

Page 

I. The Wrought Brim, 1 

II. To Find the Value of X, - - - 15 

III. Through an Old Field, - - - ■ - 31 

IV. Uses and Powers, 47 

V. The Ideal of the Scale, - - - 63 

VI. A Symphony, 77 

VII. As Snow, - - 95 

VIII. Thanks for the Ordinary, - - 109 

IX. Two Wagons, Four Oxen, - 127 

X. Transformation, ----- 145 

XI. Beauty and Sublimity, - 163 

XII. A Cyclorama, 179 



This Book is Number of a second edition 

of 200 volumes. 



The publisher records his obligation to Dr. 
Fairbanks for consenting to the printing of 
these sermons which otherwise would have 
remained only in the memory of those who 
heard them. 

St. Johnsbury, Vt., 
November 10, 1902. 



uttj? Unmgtjt Irtm 



The brim thereof was wrought like the brim of a cup with 
flowers of lilies. 

I. Kings, vii:26. 
1884. 



©ij? Uratujljt Irim 



^j^YERY day the handy little cup offers something 
if to our lips. So in common thought as in Bible 
symbolism it stands for whatever life brings to 
us. It is our lot in life. And we are to see it now as a 
cup that runneth over with good ; the brim of the cup 
wrought with God's good will as it were flowers of 
lilies. 

Front of the temple stood the great brazen fount 
cast for Solomon by Tyrian foundrymen. It resembled 
a huge bowl or drinking cup, the brim whereof made 
the writer think of ornamented cups he had seen at 
some Jerusalem banquet, or maybe in the sanctuary. 

The decorated cup has not yet gone out of fashion. 
Its porcelain sides or brim ornamented with lily work 
adorn some shelf in all our homes — often valued more 
for sentiment than for common use; and that's the 
meaning of it in our thought today. By a usage 
universal as thirst the cup is made to carry something 
more than drink. It is graced with sentiment, adorned 
often with touches of affection, it has something for the 
heart as well as for the lips. 

Taking up his lily-shaped goblet the favored Israelite 
would seem to be drinking from a lily; as in another 



Wqt itaugtji Irim 

place he was said to be feeding among lilies. What 
did that mean. It meant that whether drinking or 
eating he should see how God mingles beauty with 
use, refinement with common things. Lunching on 
any hill slope of Galilee he is to consider the lilies 
out of whose ornamented cups the land flows with 
honey as well as with milk. God was providing for 
him superabundantly. 

How do we find it in our own case. Is it merely a 
drink and a bare loaf that is dealt out to us ? On the 
contrary the hand that prepareth a table before us in 
the presence of our need, fills, replenishes, enriches, 
adorns it, and by all the process of daily supply shows 
that man doth not live by bread alone or water only. 
The Father is at infinite pains to stimulate in his 
children more fine and subtile appetites akin to his 
own, therefore he gets the table garnished and the brim 
of the cup of life wrought with ingenious device. 

We were way ward and disobedient, but he does not 
on that account shut us down like culprits to a stiff 
ugly tin cup. When he gives us water he sprinkles it 
from chalices of clouds that stand along the rim of the 
sky sometimes like burnished gold ; or he pours it out 
for us from the inverted cup of the rainbow ; or from 
overflowing basins up the mountain side whose brims 
are fringed with fern, or drip with moss and trailing 
vines. He furnishes our tables by way of intricate 
lily -work so that most of the kindly fruits of the earth 
make their trip roundaboutly to us thro' the fairy land 
of bud and blossom, as Dr. Macmillan has pointed out. 

Take the commonest things on the table. Your 
dish of green peas saluted you first in the white flowers 
that twinkled thro' the pea brush. Your plums and 



apples came along out of billows of blossoms perfuming 
the morning. Even the homely pot of baked beans was 
introduced by lily-work encircling ungainly bean poles ; 
and here is the pumpkin pie that made its way thro' 
the shapely calyx of a pumpkin or squash vine flower, 
the brim whereof was wrought like the brim of a cup of 
gold. A singer says : 

" God might have made the earth bring forth 
Enough for great and small — 
For food and medicine and life, 
Without a flower at all." 

It was by a like short, business-like process as we 
are told, that the tempter insinuated the turning of 
stones into bread; an intensely practical way, both 
for quick results and for using up worthless stones. 
Instead of which God devised a most elaborate way of 
getting seed under ground, lifting it into green blades, 
sifting on it sunlight and shower, shaking out bearded 
wheat heads or tassels and silks and streamers of corn 
waving in the summer air — using up a whole season to 
get grain ready for us ; and verily it seems to me as if 
he were all the while trying to get our attention on to 
this curious process. 

Notice also what profuse distribution of finishing 
touches of various sorts in the way of aromas, flavors, 
perfumes, coloring and tinting. Did it ever occur to you 
what a genial thought God was having for you and 
for me when he compounded the flavors of pineapples, 
peaches, quinces, guavas; when he painted the cheek 
of the plum, when he distilled the juice of the 
strawberry vine into that crimson berry. Somebody 
said the other day that God always puts up his fruits 



in beautiful wrappers. Indeed I think we appreciate 
that fact every time we polish the apple before bringing 
it on. We want to bring out the gloss that got 
dimmed in the barrel; we like to show off the coat of 
many colors that God originally put on, a snugger fit 
than Solomon had in all his glory. 

Now someone will say that all this is vapory 
sentiment. If a thing cannot be turned into cash or 
use, what's the good of it ? I had the misfortune to 
meet that same man once. Amidst the drudgery of the 
farm kitchen his wife planned for a touch of brightness 
by cherishing some window plants; and what should 
that curmudgeon do but amuse himself by pinching off 
the buds; what were they good for? they only wasted 
time and attention. What good for? A pertinent 
question and I can answer it. Good for the message 
they render from One who mingles bright colors with 
the dull routine of life, sweet roses with smells of all 
sorts from the cook stove. Good for stirring in us 

"Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 

Good for interpreting to us the wayside thoughts of 
God, kind, quaint, delicate, refreshing, and more than 
can be numbered. 

Notice a rather singular circumstance. Of necessary 
food we have enough but none too much ; the supply is 
strictly limited within a narrow margin as if to keep 
all the while on our lips a prayer for our daily bread, 
whereas of merely pretty things there is multitudinous 
and never failing superfluity. A thoughtful observer 
startled me by remarking that about the autumnal 
equinox each year the world is within a few weeks of 
starvation. I had never thought of it just that way 



3fje Wrtfanjjt Irim 

before, but it is so. All the stored grain, dried fruits, 
canned goods on the market would not fill the fourteen 
hundred millions of hungry mouths a month if the 
regular harvests wholly failed, as they often do in part. 
But whatever else fails, the flowering and decorating 
never does ; things that seem only ornamental and 
superfluous keep edging themselves modestly and 
affectionately and superabundantly into view, as if 
insisting that we see how the cup of life which our 
Father gives his children here is ornamented to the 
brim. 

That this is a correct interpretation we may see by 
arrangements that we make lor our own children. We 
do not merely feed and clothe them, and keep them 
tolerably comfortable. We entertain them with stories 
and playthings and songs and picture books and 
posies. Are these essential? They are. Half the life 
and joy of childhood is in that happy ideal world, 

"The glory and the freshness of a dream." 

And when thro' parental poverty or neglect no 
provision is made for this necessity you will see the 
native hunger assert itself in pathetic efforts of inventive 
skill — broken bits of crockery nicely arranged on a shelf 
as if they were so many costly decorated cups ; a box 
of chips idealized into a Noah's ark, each one chip 
in the line marching up as an elephant or zebra or a 
Japhet or patriarchal Noah. 

But never in God's arrangements for his children in 
this world will you find any scarcity of things designed 
simply and only to play on our imagination. It is by 
ministries of such things, not needed to keep us alive, 
that he keeps our lives enriched. The wrought brim is 



5% Wrouglft Irun 

his device delicately introduced everywhere among 
common things. 

So mother earth wears her necklace of lily-work in 
summer, of frost-work in winter, and plenty of flashing 
jewels tucked into her bosom. The hard, dusty roadside 
is adorned with greenery, and the night sky with 
twinkling chandeliers; horizons are gorgeous with 
sunset gold, the back dooryard is merry with a tilting 
titmouse chickadeeing all the year around. What 
fascinations of light and shade and color ; of pleasing 
sounds and fragrances; of flying birds or butterflies 
and all sorts of creatures interesting to look at; of 
trees, rivers, waterfalls, showers, rainbows; of green 
vales and rolling pastures and cattle on a thousand 
hills. A subtile charm, nothing else nor less than 
the goodness of the Lord floods the air brimful like 
sunlight, the zones are girdled with it, all seasons 
wear it as a coronal, in it we live and move and have 
our being. Not a day in the year when we may not 
find some tracery of lily-work around the homeliest 
drudgery of life; the stiff day's work of course must be 
attended to, but the rim thereof is ingeniously and 
marvellously ornamented. 

One result of this is that as the world grows wiser 
and tenderer, men find that life is more than it used to 
be, new and finer tastes must be provided for all the 
way up from primitive ways of living. Here is an 
incident illustrating this : an Englishman fell into the 
hands of cannibals ; they considered him a prize for 
their peculiar purposes and with gleeful prospect 
reserved him for a great occasion. But the chiefs 
daughter being tenderhearted managed to hide him 
and bring him food. This reminded him of Red Riding 

8 



Hood, and with such signs as he could invent he got 
that story into her mind. The effect was magical. A 
new demand was created. Every day she must have a 
story, till guessing how it might work, she told the 
chief that if he would spare the man's life long enough 
to tell a story she would produce him. This was done. 
It all worked as she wanted it to, the chief and his 
warriors liked the story telling so well, they could not 
deprive themselves of that luxury even by satisfying 
their original expectations on the man himself. Now 
for the first time they discovered that life was more 
than meat, its edge was rimmed with fairy tales like 
the grotesque carvings on their drinking gourds. 

Allowing for more or less touch of romance — and 
our theme would almost call for that — I am ready to 
believe this story as wholly true to nature. In fact 
tho it may not seem complimentary to say so, we have 
had a little story of our own not a whole hemisphere 
off from this. All we cared for at first was something 
to drink or to eat. After a while we were old enough 
to feed on nursery tales, picture books, Bible stories; 
farther on we drank from founts of music, poetry, art 
and song; at length like Kepler we began to think 
God's great thoughts; life was not meat and drink but 
righteousness and peace; sentiment, ideality, truth, 
duty, insight, worship, spiritual affection. The deepest 
demand in us was for realities of a world unseen; 
for harmony, for beauty, for love, and for a God 
who notwithstanding our neglect of him was tracing 
lily -work of goodness around our cup. 

You may be wondering now if the minister has 
forgotten that bitter things are in the cup as well as 
lily-work on the brim. Not at all. We cannot disguise 



®lp> Urcugljt Iron 

what is bitter, nor shove out of sight the unwelcome 
things of life. They confront us persistently and 
tragically. We must look them full in the face. Sin 
and suffering are here to stay; worse things are in 
the world than words can tell. What falsities, what 
iniquitous and atrocious doings, what injustice and 
brutality; what burdens, wrongs, pains, distresses, 
disasters, insomuch that many a poor soul is 

" falling with its weight of cares 

Upon the great world's altar stairs 

That slope thro' darkness up to God." 

All this is so. But yet after all that is worst has 
been spread out and surveyed in soberness till we grow 
dumb and pale and sick at heart, even then along the 
rim of the dense blackness we may surely look for some 
silvery edging. God was always front of men to give 
some ray of hope, some alleviating touch where least 
expected. The sorrowful way out of Eden was gilded 
with a promise. Jehovah talked kindly with Cain. 
Over the drenched and dreary world just flooded out he 
bent the fair colors of his bow woven with covenant 
blessing. The water in the hollow desert cup at Marah 
was bitter, but on its brim nature had wrought some 
green leaves that sweetened it. 

Very suggestive is that Bible story. For all our 
ills and stings and hurts and pains there are near 
by antidotes and remedies; for all sorrows there are 
alleviations; even sin is ringed about with a marvellous 
redemption. Sin is as profound a mystery as ever it 
was ; so is the distribution and volume of suffering, 
especially as it falls on childhood and innocence. I 
do not wonder that it brought from Michelet 



10 



®Jj? Urougljt Irtm 

the cry "alas, was pain so needful that it must be 
prodigalized !" 

To that cry there is no answer in terms of our logic 
or mathematics. But there is this one monumental 
fact to be kept in full view, namety, that pain was first 
and supremely prodigalized in the God who appointed 
it, who in all our affliction is himself afflicted, who in 
the person of his dear Son drank bitterness to the dregs 
and tasted death for every man. The cup which 
could not pass from our Redeemer was wrought with 
compassions of God's heart like lily-work, it was 
brimmed with forgiveness for the men who crucified 
him. The hour and power of darkness had come, as 
he said, but thro' it all I think the flower bells of 
Gethsemane swung out their sweetest incense, and 
Siloa's brook went softly as it never went before. 

Awhile ago I was speaking of the over-plus and 
abounding variety of the pleasant things God has 
arrayed around us. All these we may think of as 
overflows of a benevolent heart. But when it comes to 
the serious facts of our sin and guilt it needs more than 
pleasant things even by the world full to meet the 
gravity of the case. That calls for outflow of another 
sort; and it came as one would never have guessed, it 
came when the Saviour poured out his soul unto death 
for us. This is the tracery depicted on the cup of 
salvation — the good shepherd giveth his life for the 
sheep. If it was 

" In the beauty of the lilies 

Christ was born across the sea," 

it was in the holier beauty of suffering for our sakes 
that he died on the hill. Bv that sacrifice we are 



II 



®{p> Urnagljt Irtm 

certified that God meets us at the farthest bound of 
our demerit and in the sorest stress of our trouble; 
whatever cup is passed to us compassion and goodness 
may be said to be wrought on the brim thereof. There 
will be dry and hard places on the path of our 
pilgrimage, just there too maybe will be pleasant 
surprises. I can see even now on the wide El Rakineh 
waste above Sinai one solitary crocus that lifted its 
golden cup to some pilgrims on a sultry day. Even the 
melancholy desert is fringed with lily-work, 

" And the crocus grows, 
O the crocus grows 
The old sweet way." 

That lily-work on the brim of the cup was not 
needed for practical purposes ; it added nothing to the 
worth of the cup as a utensil; nevertheless it was 
laboriously wrought in, a costly design of handwork ; 
superfluous if you please — but, the only thing about the 
cup that interests us today is that same wrought brim. 
I do not think a cooling draft from the cup could 
refresh us so much this time as the flowery brim, for 
this last has beguiled our thoughts away from staple 
necessities, from hard facts, and made us see something 
everywhere on the rim of things prophetic of more and 
better things provided by a Father for his children. 

It looks very much as if he planned that man should 
not live by bread alone, nor by words of old time only, 
but by every fresh and fragrant thought wafted to us 
on the summer breeze, or penciled in color on clouds, 
horizons, oceans, landscapes, rainbows, fruits and 
flower cups that toil not neither do they spin. Bless 
the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits; 



12 



SI}? Wrought Irwt 

he satisfieth thy mouth with good things — but the 
principal thing is, as Paul said to the Lystrians, that 
he is filling our hearts with food and gladness. It 
was so yesterday, it will be so tomorrow. Looking 
backward we see that whatever the filling of the years 
has been, some softened and silvery lines of memory 
edge them all; looking forward, surely goodness and 
mercy shall brighten all the days of our life as already 
they gild the rim of the world beyond. 

At any time the cup that represents our life may be 
plain and in it things we do not like, but one thing we 
can depend on— a divine ingenuity will all the while 
be skillfully wreathing loving kindnesses and tender 
mercies upon the brim thereof. 



n 



©0 3\nh itp> late nf % 



Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet 
appear what we shall be. 

I. John, iii:2. 
1883. 



®o Jfato % Mtu? of 3C 



^U+JHAT we shall be. Here is x, the unknown 
111 quantity, and fascinating because unknown. 
It doth not yet appear. It sets us guessing 
and wondering. But wait a moment. 

Doth it even yet appear what we are already. Job 
in his searching could not find out God, presently he 
learned that he could not even find out Job. No man 
can see God, but who that lives can see himself, or 
sketch his own portrait. You can look at your face 
with a mirror, can get a diagram of your brain, 
can figure your present capacity for mathematics or 
business or politics, can roughly estimate the sort of 
character you are. But the broad and various compass 
of the one you call yourself doth not yet appear. 

While Aeneas at Carthage waited for the coming 
of the Queen, he noticed on the walls of Juno's 
temple picturings of the Trojan war, and soon among 
illustrious chiefs there figured 

" se quoque agnovit" 
he recognized himself. Much more important than old 
wind-swept Ilium are the fields that we are on today, 
and right in the midst you may recognize one figure 
tolerably familiar ; tu ipse agnovisti, it is yourself; yet 

17 



2% Urnuglff Irutt 

only in merest outline like some shadowy figure on the 
frescoed temple wall. 

It doth not yet appear what you really are in your 
deep and permanent self today — you, just a common 
person but singularly gifted, and with free range every 
way, anywhere, from your plain door step to God's 
high pillared throne. No sooner have you recognized 
yourself even slightly than you are surprised at yourself. 
There is more to you, more in you, more for you than 
you guessed. And what is this but prophecy of some 
larger self that doth not yet appear. Yourself farther 
on. Did you hear John Stirling ? 

"What thou art today, foreshows to me 
How greater far, thou soon shalt be." 

Let x be the unknown quantity which doth not 
yet appear. Yourself in the larger view. Now to find 
the value of x, there are several things to be thought of 
and worked into the equation. 

There is for one thing (a) the sum of your 
capabilities. How great is the sum of them. Suppose 
you have taken the inventory. Before getting it fairly 
into the equation, some new faculty or fresh adaptation 
begins to be distinctly felt within you, here a hint, there 
a flash, something indicating that you cannot take the 
measure of your abilities till tomorrow or next day or 
somewhere fifty years from now. 

God has a way of folding up in every young life, 
qualities in germ ; capabilities scarcely suspected, till, 
one by one, they come out from their hiding-places 
and show themselves to their surprised and pleased 
possessor. Something calls out a new faculty or 
facility, we are only older children gradually getting 
possession of our latent powers. 

18 



On the floor at the east window I saw the baby 
playing with her little elephant. Suddenly she made a 
discovery, she found he could be made to stand on his 
rump with trunk projected into the air. This was an 
achievement. Thereafter the beast was not allowed 
to be a well-balanced elephant on four legs ; the new 
attitude was insisted on to assert the mastery of a 
young mind, the imperial will of a discoverer. Now 
that memorable discovery was only one of a series such 
as we all have been making up the scale of our personal 
powers, from the mastery of cloth cats and elephants 
to the management of great affairs, including withal 
the orders we give off to ourselves as when we say 
inwardly — here, take this posture or position, work 
this problem, this job, stand to this duty and do it. 

We have learned some things already. But I am 
much mistaken if we do not find somewhere, half hid, 
half revealed, in the machinery of our being, new ideals 
and motives always coming up; new peculiarities 
of temper, disposition and various idiosyncrasy; 
new susceptibilities to feeling, sentiment, affection, 
benevolence; larger powers of application, search, 
invention, endurance, patience, force, persistence; new 
and unique qualities of heart; bright thoughts that 
wake once to perish never; fresh energies, singular 
aptitudes, fine sagacities, undiscovered conscience, 
intellect, will; a sterner sense of moral obligation. 
These all, and more too, are in the problem of what 
we shall be. Elements of power 

"The which observed, a man may prophesy 
With a near aim of the main chance of things 
As yet not come to life ; which in their seeds 
And weak beginnings lie intreasured." 

'9 



Sometimes this comes like a flash. Said a man 
whose original mind had struck out for itself a career 
its own, "In a little old schoolhouse in the pasture, 
sitting on a slab with legs so long that my feet could 
not touch the floor — there, seventy years ago I first 
got the idea that I was a power." That was Horace 
Bushnell. I think Richter must have been younger 
when he stood on the doorstep looking leftward at the 
woodpile and suddenly cried out "Ick bin ein Ich." 
"Like a flash from heaven it came to me, then my me 
for the first time saw itself and forever it will be 
myself." 

Not always does the magic touch come so early. 
One's most real self may lie dormant many years. 
Handel was forty-eight before the chord was struck 
that waked him to himself. Not till middle life did 
Grant discover the soldier that was in him. I wonder 
how Saul tingling with a sense of his masterfulness 
would act, if on the way to Damascus somebody should 
hint to him what powers of love are slumbering in his 
soul, what mingling of humility and chivalry, what 
self-effacing heroism. Unused powers must in every 
case be taken into account before one discovers himself, 
for it is a new and larger self that he is appointed to. 
It doth not yet appear what unsuspected force within 
you, or what awakening event outside of you may 
operate to shift the probability or certainty of what 
you shall be. 

But to find the value of x, your undiscovered self, 
we must have not only the sum of your capabilities, 
but (b) the compounding of them, the adjustment, 
balance and correlation of them. Out of the same 
materials we get endless variety of results according to 



20 



®n $wb tfp> Haim> nf X 

their combination. On the blackboard we see algebraic 
symbols, x, y, z, -f, — , 8, 4, 3, 7, but in such new and 
various juxtaposition that what the value of x shall be 
doth not appear till each separate combination is 
worked out. 

Out of his mysterious treasury of nothing God 
summoned four chief elements known to us as oxygen, 
nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and these four he so 
curiously compounded, adjusted to such perpetual 
variations, that with them for main foundations he 
has brought out the world and all that is therein — 
mountain, cloud, forest, river, air; flower and fruit; 
beasts and all cattle ; dragons, behemoth and horns of 
the unicorn ; ruby, pearl, onyx ; common dust either 
flying on the highway or built without hammer or 
tool into the bodily frame that you call yourself. 
Nomenclatures of n, o, h, c, enter into everything. 

Out of his veiled laboratory of spirit God has 
drawn four chief elements, which without trying to 
be too philosophical we may speak of as reason, 
conscience, will and sensibility. With these as main 
foundations he has brought out as many distinct 
variations as there are people in the world. Thus each 
soul of us is at the start a novelty, its like has not 
arisen before, its balance of parts is on a new formula, 
its unfolding is after a fashion of its own, its product 
all the way along will be a specialty that doth not yet 
appear. We like originality when we see it, therein we 
inherit the tastes of our Creator ; and each one of us is 
to contribute one original life piece to his interesting 
cabinet of ideas, expression and character. He that 
wrought effectually in Peter one way was mighty in 
Paul another way, and in you and in me two other 



21 



®fj? Urougljt Irfm 

ways. Now the pattern of yourself being quaint to 
begin with, and never at any one time altogether 
worked out, it cannot yet appear what you will be 
when you get yourself rounded up more fully, each 
separate part in true balance and all working together 
nicely. 

But to find the value of x your undeveloped self we 
must have not only the sum and the balance of your 
parts, but (c) the will-force that is put upon them, their 
direction and use, and the conscience that goes into 
them. Browning's idea is that 

" When the fight begins within himself, 
A man's worth something." 

For one has to enforce obedience upon his powers, 
and likely as not that sets up a fight inside. You have 
good parts, what are you doing with them. Not in the 
tent nursing his wrath folding his sinews does it appear 
that Achilles is swift-footed, still less that he is manly. 
When you set to, to do something worth while inside 
yourself or outside, then it will begin to appear what 
you shall be, what you may arrive at. It happens that 
in real life the race is not always to the swift; it is 
to those who go and go right on. It is no mean 
accomplishment to be able to plod, as William Cary 
said of himself: it did not then appear that this plain 
plodder at the shoe bench was the man who would 
pioneer modern missions, master twenty-four Asiatic 
tongues and give the Bible to three hundred million 
men. 

You had better give respectful salute to the habit of 
persistence, for it will be on the average a surer factor 
in the problem of x than first endowments — or, as 



22 



Oio Jtnfc % Halur of X 

Emerson would have us believe, practice is nine-tenths. 
He reckons that it took seven years' stumping it thro' 
England to make Cobden a debator, and twice that 
amount of stumping it here in New England to train 
Wendell Phillips. Very good. It is trained men, trained 
characters that we want. We have an extra supply 
already who are smart, or think they are. Promising 
lives have been spoiled by nothing worse than 
smartness inflating the organ of self-importance, or 
cutting the nerve of application, or sapping the 
strength of conscientious effort. 

I would stand, said Dr. Arnold, speaking of one of 
his Rugby boys who was more persistent than brilliant, 
1 would stand to that boy hat in hand. Some 
instructors and people not a few, would make the 
mistake of bestowing admiration on just the opposite 
principle, reckoning common work as merely pegging, 
no sparkle of genius in it whatever. True, but the grip 
of will-force is in it, and in the long run you may depend 
on this as the determining factor. It answers the 
question for each one what he shall be, and for human 
progress what it shall be. Great souls are those that 
have trained themselves to say, I will: and to say of 
some hard high thing, it shall be. God works 
his greatest works along this groove of man's 
determinations. One mystery of converting grace is 
this fact, that it cannot do anything for a man till his 
own strong will takes hold 



" to pick the vicious quitch 

Of blood and custom wholly out of him, 

And make all clean and plant himself afresh." 

It is on this pivot of consenting will that each soul 
turns to God and begins the reckoning of a new value 

2 3 



STtje Htnugtft Irtm 

of x. Follow me, said Jesus to a man, and he arose 
and followed him. That reads easily. But it wasn't 
done off-hand, you may be sure. It took a forceful 
purpose to break away from the passion of money 
getting, then as now. Nor did it then appear that a 
pen sold under the spell and trickery of the tax counter 
would some day be writing the first Gospel. It doth 
not yet appear what honorable place or work or life 
any one may arrive at, if with intelligent decision he 
gives himself, his tools, his business, his abilities to the 
service of the Lord. 

But to find the value of x, in your case, we must 
take account of another factor (d) the combination, 
the system of things that you are in and fastened to. 
That nut of iron in the carriage shop, as you and I see 
it, is merely a square bit of iron with a hole in it — but 
the carriage maker sees it as a very essential part of a 
machine, made to run behind a horse on the highway; 
what the value of that piece of iron shall be doth 
not appear, till, being in place, the carriage runs 
handsomely ; or lost out, an accident befalls, somebody 
hurt or killed. The nut gets value from the machine it 
is in. The safety of my life may depend on the nut of a 
king bolt. 

In your case, then, the value of x, your unknown 
self, must be reckoned not only from the sum of your 
capacities, plus the peculiar balance of them, plus the 
will-force put upon them ; but also from the rank and 
import of the machine you are in — the completeness of 
which depends on your being in place properly. 

Now this living, palpitating machine of humanity, 
who can compass the breadth of it, built of millions of 
generations of human lives, belted and cogged into one 



5ta $mb tip* Uato nf !X 

consummate structure. Who can detect its hid and 
intricate movement ; wheel within wheel of influence ; 
most subtle interplay of mind and heart and enterprise ; 
and of contending or co-operating wills. Who can 
figure its prodigious importance, since to save it from 
going to pieces, God has in the person of Jesus Christ, 
riveted himself to it ; who can paint the beauty of the 
finished product, which is, not the bringing out of 
a fresh clean unmarred company of souls, but the 
bringing in of scattered fragments of lives; mending 
and resetting in place, human beings that were total 
wrecks; actually polishing a race of souls dug out of 
mires of ignorance and iniquity; and setting on the 
brow of manhood the crown of immortal honor. 

It doth not yet appear what critical values are in 
you except with full and glad consent you are in 
position, pivoted adjusted and bolted to your one 
share in the spiritual machinery of the world. Other 
lives than yours are in the problem, some touch from 
each one thrills along the entire shafting. What you 
shall be is defined in part by what other people are or 
will be because of you. Each life acting on its fellow is 
reacted on, and the value of x is multiplied by the 
values of more lives than I can enumerate. 

"For what man stirs a finger, breaths a sound, 
But all the multitudinous beings round 
Thrill haply in vibration and rebound, 

Life answering life across the vast profound 
In full antiphony. " 

Once more, to find the value of x, yourself that shall 
be, we must enter into the equation (e) the fact of a 
spiritual ancestry and relationship. Read the verse 
again and notice the first clause — beloved now are we 



25 



3JJp> -Urtfuglji Irtm 

the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we 
shall be. This means that much is to be expected from 
children of such parentage. Men reason that way 
always. There was something in the child of the 
peasant woman Spaco, so runs the story, that 
betokened a career above the ordinary. But when 
after some while it came out that he was not peasant- 
born but of royal blood, immediately great things were 
looked for, for now was he the son of a king. Now 
must he prove that Cyrus is the man for a throne. 

Whose sou is this stripling stepping into camp with 
the head of the Philistine bored by a sling stone? That 
question looks forward even more than backward. We 
can neither appreciate our birthright nor calculate our 
possible measure till we know whose sons we are and 
what it means that we are sons of God. Often it means 
nothing to us for the reason that we have assumed a 
different ancestry ; we have known too well that we 
are wayward children as all our fathers were of a 
gainsaying and disobedient race. By unfilial disposition 
and doings we have lost good standing in God's family 
and almost lost any idea that we can be sons of God. 

0, but this is not the way the Father wants us to 
think of it. He does not let go of us because we are 
naughty, nor does he allow us to be satisfied with what 
can be got in peasants' huts or in any far country of 
husks. Let the wanderer come to himself and he will 
know whose son he is and begin to guess dimly what 
he shall be. The story of every life won back to the 
Father is a romance; a story of love answering love, of 
soul knit to soul in the mystery of sacrifice and 
gratitude. 

The value of x is to be computed from these noble 

26 



ota arutb % Uato of X 

factors not from any low-born or base propensities 
that make their unwelcome haunt within us. We will 
not blink the fact that we do badly, but neither let us 
miss the fact that we are ashamed of it and want to be 
quit of it, that a cry comes up from the inner deeps 

" for a man to arise in me, 

That the man I am may cease to be." 

Now it was to answer this cry that God sent his 
Son to stay awhile in this country, to be one with us, to 
get hold of the lost children and bring them home to 
the life of love. Almost the first thing he did was to 
get us to say Our Father; no sooner do we say that, 
affectionately and truly, than the whole value of life 
is changed, enriched a thousand fold. The coming of 
the Son of God was to bring many sons new-born to 
their birthright and inheritance. Now are we sons, 
here in the country-house as we might say; not hired 
servants but sons who share the father's plans, talk 
with him about the goodly matters of the spiritual 
estate, catch his intentions and do them — because we 
must ? No, because we want to, because his will is ours 
and we will have it done in earth as it is in heaven. 

So much for what we are here in the first period, 
and it doth not yet appear what we shall be as years 
pass or ages. I would like to apply the horoscope and 
report to you what aspects are taking shape thro' the 
veiled perspective — what unfoldings of mind and heart, 
what enrichment of sensibility, imagination, experience, 
character, what the value of x will be at the end, say, of 
the next millennium. At that far height, free of present- 
day entanglements , it doth not appear to me with 
what speed and many-sided growth you are distancing 

27 



all nay reckonings. Clearly you are the same person as 
now, with every characteristic mark and mood of 
your own self only carried to a higher power. What 
spacious intelligence, what nicely-poised and skilled 
abilities ; what generosity of love, of service ; what 
exhilaration and flush of spiritual life. Always it is 
better farther on, and yet I see 

" we cannot reach the height 

That lies forever in the light." 

The value of x, our future self, is an unknown 
quantity, unknown forever, and so forever fascinating 
— a, plus b, plus c, plus d, plus e, equals x. But infinity 
is in the problem ; it takes eternity to work it ; it will 
never be done. It doth not yet appear what we shall 
be. It never will. 



28 



®t|t0U^ an (§lh 3wlh 



Behold, there went out a sower to sow: and it came to pass, as he 
sowed, some fell by the way side. 

Mark, iv: 3, 4. 

1874. 



©jriwglj an (®lb Melb 



^f#T was on the border of the great plain of Philistia 
^11 as thou comest up from the wilderness of Sinai. 
Sojourning many days in Meshech made us long 
for the sight of some green thing, and I well remember 
how delicious the little tufts of coarse grass looked as 
we neared the pool of Beer-la-hai-roi, where many noisy 
Ishmaelites got together. Presently green fields began 
to unroll themselves, dotted with anemonies and 
poppies and pretty silken-fleeced goats nibbling as if 
they enjoyed it. Here were the pasture grounds of the 
patriarchs where Abraham and Isaac pitched their 
tents and sowed and reaped. It says that Isaac sowed 
in that land and received in the same year an hundred 
fold for the Lord blessed him. 

I was wishing that some belated sower would 
appear with seed to sow, that I might see just how 
that old time farmer used to do it. Owing to long 
rains it was not too late for putting in seed this spring 
being the fifth day of March; and to my great 
satisfaction as we rounded a rocky knoll on the left 
there opened before us a field freshly broken for barley. 

And behold, a sower going forth to sow. He was 
a big fellow, well built; the seed basket hung on his 

33 



left arm, and a pair of fish skin sandals dangled from 
his girdle. His back was to us and he did not seem to 
notice our little train as it wound along the edge of the 
field. We were all looking to see how he scattered the 
seed swinging his right arm to and fro with forceful 
measured strokes. 

And it came to pass as he sowed some seed fell by 
the wayside and when we got there it was trodden 
under foot. This wayside was an ancient trail that we 
had just struck into from the east. Thousands of 
camels and asses and generations of men had trodden 
it. Along here the Midianites went carrying balm and 
spicery and a Hebrew lad down into Egypt ; over this 
path the child Jesus was brought after that Herod was 
dead who sought his life. Others besides ourselves were 
on it that bright spring morning. Some were going 
with loaded camels to Gaza, some were on their way 
to Cairo riding Syrian horses, some were astride the 
haunches of diminutive donkeys swinging their toes 
out and in after the odd fashion they have there. But 
the sower paid no attention to any of us wayfarers, he 
kept right along with his work and the seed flew from 
his hand in curves everyway. 

That that fell on the wayside either bounded off, or 
as I have said, was trodden under foot. Now the 
Doctor whose camel was just front of mine knew the 
country well, he had lived in Syria many years, was 
author of a work entitled The Land and the Book, so I 
asked him if seed would ever take root on such ground 
as that. You can see for yourself, he said, instead of 
dropping on a mellow bed where it can easily be 
covered, it strikes like a ball on the pavement, it is 
truth on the ear not in the heart. 



34 



This I could plainly see, but how is it, I asked, that 
our wayside path answers to a man's heart? Why, 
said the Doctor, don't you see it is the many and 
constant footfalls that harden the pathway, none of 
them heavy but each adding a bit to the pressure — it is 
the great many wrong thoughts, desires, habits, or 
neglects and inattentions that harden the susceptibility 
of men to truth. Some of these may not be so very 
bad, others are, but all together they wear a hard path 
across the field of religious sensibilities ; over which all 
sorts pass — easy pressures of indifference, the stiff heel 
of avarice, lingering steps of envy and jealousy, swift 
run of passionate feeling, tripping footfalls of pleasure, 
or stately tread of self-righteousness. So what can 
the word of God do but strike and rebound. 

The Doctor was silent a few moments, then 
suddenly looking up he said — after all it needs nothing 
worse than neglect to spoil the heart for receiving 
truth. I am thinking of Agil Husn, a young fruit 
merchant of Sidon ; the first time we told him the story 
of Jesus it affected him to tears, but not yielding his 
heart to it he soon lost all sensibility to that and to 
everything else we had to say. That I fear is what ails 
so many in our home land, hearers but not doers. It is 
painful to think that what seems like respectful hearing 
may become a process of heart hardening, just for lack 
of serious purpose and willingness to do something. 

Seeing how Graves and I watched the sower as he 
sowed, the Doctor asked if we had any idea of the cost 
of a handful of seed. Graves told him we paid five or 
ten cents a package for garden seeds at home, but he 
couldn't guess on the cost of that which was flying 
from the hand of this sower. No, he said, I don't think 



35 



®lj? Urnuglft Irun 

you could ; for that seed not only cost the sower all his 
last year's work, but all the work of all the years since 
men began to till the ground. It has cost the toil and 
sweat of generations of sowers and reapers to get a 
good quality of seed and perpetuate it. It is literally 
precious seed, and that's what makes it so suggestive 
as an illustration of truth. 

Suppose you try to compute the cost of some of the 
seed truths of our religion, such as come to us in the 
short old Bible words — grace, truth, faith, peace, hope, 
love, life. Think what a history is behind these; what 
training of the patriarchs who sowed these very fields 
we are on, what burdens of the prophets up yonder, 
what ministries of love in Galilee, what blood and 
sweat in Gethsemane, what persecutions of the first 
disciples, what sufferings of good souls thro many 
ages, what loyalty and devotion to get the good seed, 
the simple unmixed Bible seed safely delivered to our 
hand as we have it today. You see it is precious seed, 
this little package of New Testament truths, simply 
reckoning its cost, not to speak of all its worth to our 
life and our future. And yet the best thing we can do 
is to keep scattering it abroad as the sow^er does. 

While the Doctor was talking the sower continued 
to sow, and as he sowed some fell by a wayside lane 
that ran up into the field at right angles from our path. 
After he had got by I noticed a flock of birds flying 
from the branches of a sycamore tree just behind. 
They took a wide sweep to the south then up over this 
lane where they alighted and began picking up the seed 
as if they were half starved. It was interesting to see 
how hard they were at it, and how unconscious the 
sower was of what was going on behind him. 

1 36 



oiljroujgif an ©lb WwUt 

I did not need to ask anything about this except 
the name of the birds, for I was not sure whether they 
were larks or sparrows. Beadle, who was riding 
nearest me now, said there was good authority for 
calling them wicked ones, catching away that which is 
sown where the sower soweth the word, tho I confess, 
said he, it used to go against me to have innocent song 
birds coupled in my thought with the wicked one. Do 
you see it any differently now, I asked. Yes. Things 
that seem in themselves entirely harmless do sometimes 
operate to steal away the seed of truth. It may be an 
innocent pleasure or a genial book or some demand of 
a refined and cultivated taste coming in just when 
attention is needed on the supreme question of life, that 
like these graceful birds get the seed away. 

The sower continued to sow and I could see it was 
just as Beadle said, for those pretty little birds kept 
busily catching up the wayside seed. I was reminded 
of it years later when a person whom I will call Julius 
told me about his sudden loss of religious feeling. He 
somehow had an idea that the evil one had caught it 
away and wondered why he was at fault for losing 
that which he really wanted to keep. Well, I said, see 
how it is in the corn field ; the fowls come to devour up 
the seed, what then ? weave cords around the field 
which the crow likes not; weave network of watch 
and faith and prayer around the inner enclosure of 
which the devourer of good thoughts is always wary. 
Three months after, Julius referred to the matter again 
and told me that this was exactly what he had 
neglected to do, and he had no difficulty now in placing 
the blame of his decline where it belonged. 

Our camels were striding along slowly till they 

37 



brought us to a place where the ground bordered on a 
ledge of limestone. This ledge sloped into the earth 
very gradually like the shelving of a beach into water, 
and on the upper edge of it was a little pillar of four 
stones laid one upon another, set up by somebody 
years before maybe to mark some event. Rude little 
monuments of this sort we had often met on the desert 
and always wished they could tell us their story of love 
or loss or worship or whatever. One such pillar I 
remembered was set up some miles northeast of this 
field by Jacob at the place which he called Beth-El, but 
the name of which was Luz at the first. 

Meanwhile the sower continued to sow, and some 
of the seed had fallen on the stony ground, or shallov^ 
ground that covered the lower shelf of the ledge. I was 
still looking at the pillar of four stones trying to 
construct some pathetic story to fit to it, when I heard 
others of our party discussing probabilities about the 
seed that had fallen there. One said it would never get 
a start on such ground. Another thought it would 
spring up pretty quickly because there was no deepness 
of earth for the sunheat to penetrate. Mitchell was 
sure it -would make a start and then get scorched when 
the sun was up, so having no deep root it would wither 
away. 

Mitchell had been over here nine years before and 
often seen withered barley in late spring on bits of 
shallow shelving soil just like this. But, said he, one 
needn't come so far as to this Philistia field to see that. 
Graves looked up enquiringly and Mitchell went on to 
say — you know that when the war broke out I was 
living in Richmond, indeed I barely escaped into the 
Union lines, leaving all my books and belongings 

38 



UJljrfluglj an (§lh 3'uli 

behind. Well, that of course was not to my liking, but 
I did like Richmond as a field for seed-sowing, the 
people were open-hearted and receptive ; indeed some at 
first were so easily persuaded that I feared it might be 
only a surface feeling. So in fact it proved, for when 
some petty tribulation came, something which they 
didn't just like, immediately they fell away, having no 
deep root in themselves. 

I nodded to Mitchell that I understood what he 
was saying, and asked what should be done to remedy 
this shallow type of religion. Of course, he answered, 
there are differences in people, some natures are shallow 
to begin with and grow more so by habit. 

The surface thoughts of such people are easily 
moved; but there is in every heart something lower 
down which the Bible calls the inward thought which 
is very deep ; to reach this it needs the spirit of God 
convincing and converting. The case is not wholly 
unpromising even for a somewhat superficial nature. 
There was at Richmond a light hearted girl who 
seemed as you might say incapable of serious 
convictions about anything; it almost surprised me to 
find that something said one Sunday evening about 
cherishing and deepening spiritual influences had really 
impressed her mind a good deal. As time went on she 
developed unexpected strength of purpose and came to 
be a real good Christian woman. Mitchell thought we 
ought to seek the Spirit's transforming grace with all 
our sowing of the seed, for his heavenly influences 
working silently in the soul were as needful for spiritual 
life as sun and shower and mysterious underground 
workings in this old field to bring up the seed. 

Yes, said the Doctor, God's husbandry— laying out 

39 



this earth field with us in it, sending down little seeds 
of truth, supplying sunlight of love and storms of 
temptation and showers of blessing and quickening 
breath of the Spirit like the south wind— blow, 
Breath ! 

While we were talking the sower continued to sow 
and as he sowed some fell among thorns, that is among 
bellan bushes bristling all over with thorns so thick 
and stiff that a goat would find it hard to get through. 
This was on a slope toward the north side of the field. 
Of course the sower did not purposely waste his seed 
among these bushes, but he did sow a bit of about ten 
paces adjoining, from which the shrubbery had been 
cut off and over which the crooked joint of a plow had 
passed. I should not have minded about this, but the 
Doctor pointing that way said there was the place to 
find seed among thorns ; that strip of ten paces beside 
the thorn thicket looks well on the surface but the soil 
is full of thorn roots. The barley will come up, so will 
the bellan ; but this last you see will have advantage of 
the barley in the strong roots native to the soil. It 
will crowd the barley under ground and overshadow 
it above worse than any witchgrass in your garden up 
in Vermont. The reaper will not gather sheaves from 
that which fell among thorns. 

Beadle, who was now alongside the Doctor, 
swinging his camel halter to and fro as if thinking of 
something, took up the words at once — no sheaves 
from seed among thorns. It reminds me of my old 
friend Conductor Elkins of the New York and Erie. He 
used to tell me that he felt the need of religion and 
ought to be a Christian man, but the care of running 
his trains, attending to people and looking after so 



40 



Stfjrnuglj an ©lit 3M& 

much miscellany absorbed all his time and strength, he 
simply couldn't take up religious matters at all. I 
didn't remind him of the sudden and final manner in 
which men of the road are sometimes relieved of all 
their affairs, but I told him of a man well known to me 
in Rochester, manager of one of the largest flouring 
mills in that city, charged with responsible and difficult 
business, who somehow found time to pray, to gather 
up a good bit of the pith and marrow of the Bible, to 
help his men on in the same good way, to attend church 
and now and then take a Bible class. I rather 
wondered myself, said Beadle, how he did so much, but 
the secret no doubt was that, like the ancient wall 
builders, he had a mind to it ; the ground was not so 
wholly preoccupied with thorn roots as to crowd out 
other important matters. I told Conductor Elkins that 
if he would cultivate a mind to it, he could serve God 
while he walked the train, or waited at the station, 
or mixed with men, as truly as if he were reading a 
psalm or going to meeting, tho of course due time 
must be given for such things. But the fact is, and you 
see it everywhere, lots of things get in first, all the 
plans and jobs and arrangements and business and 
work and miscellaneous doings of the days that get 
rooted in the heart and choke the word that it bringeth 
no fruit to perfection. 

Beadle began swinging his camel halter again as 
he had a way of doing whenever something interested 
him, till turning sharply to the left we saw the sower 
coming toward us, and as he sowed some fell on good 
ground, on soil that was light and mellow- and ready 
to take the seed into its bosom. 

Now there, said the Doctor, is a thing worth notice. 



4* 



®t?* Krnufltft Irtm 

That is good soil, as we say, but good for what? 
Simply for receiving something that will get life out of 
it. Lying there by itself the ground, even good ground, 
is good for nothing. But the sower comes along and 
drops something into it ; that little barley corn sinking 
into it gets hold of dead particles of soil and somehow 
draws them up into its own life, converts them into a 
growing thing that rises green and graceful into the 
sunlight. The seed converts the dead soil into barley 
as you might say. 

Why that, said Mitchell, makes me think of a 
gardener in New Jersey whose heart was as barren of 
religion as this bare field; one day he noticed in the New 
York Tribune something said by Henry Ward Beecher 
to the effect that it was the very essence of God's 
nature to care for a man in order to help him— a 
simple truth, but to him a wholly new idea which 
dropped into his soul like seed from another world. 
It was a coincidence, wasn't it, that on the very 
day he was planting sweet corn in Col. Pratt's 
garden, the seed of a new life had been planted in his 
heart, which within three months changed all his 
views of life and made a new man of him. 

One would almost think, said Beadle, pointing over 
toward the sower, that this whole field, the soil the 
sower and the seed were made and fitted together 
on purpose to be for a parable. Men's hearts inert 
and dead to spiritual things until a sower comes 
dropping seed truths into them, but even then no 
growth unless the seed is received and hid in the heart 
to be working its mystery of life there. How 
picturesquely the Chief Sower outlined his own work 
in the sower going forth to sow; how skillfully he 



4 2 



SJfjrnuglj an ©lb 3tettt 

set each hearer in his true place, in the wayside, shallow 
ground or thorn patch ; what a happy winding up of 
the story on good ground where they who in an 
honest and good heart having heard the word keep it, 
and bring forth fruit, some thirty fold, some sixty and 
some an hundred. 

While Beadle was saying this, the sower still sowed, 
but as he sowed we went on and he was left behind. I 
was glad to notice that the last seed we saw flying 
from his hand fell on good ground. Then the shelving 
ledge with the pillar of four stones came between us, 
and the sower as he sowed was hid from view. 

But we kept on talking about him while our beasts 
made their slow way up the plain and across the Wady 
esh Sheriyah, till toward evening the white minarets 
of Gaza rose before us with here and there a graceful 
palm tree between. The plowed field was now far 
behind ; we followed the tufted lance of Sheikh Hassein 
thro the sand dunes and orange groves that skirt the 
city, and at sundown of the twenty-ninth day out we 
were at the entering in of the gates of Gaza. 

But all that night between the barking of dogs and 
the chattering of Gaza men on the Khan roof, there in 
our dreams was the sower going forth to sow, and as 
he sowed the last seed that we saw fell on good ground. 
And even now tho many years have passed, I can see 
that same sower striding the old field of the patriarchs, 
swinging the seed with measured strokes, scattering 
precious seed upon good ground, knowing that in due 
time he shall come again rejoicing having sheaves with 
him. 

I remember too -what the Sower said who went 
forth in the fields of Galilee — that he who receiveth the 



43 



®{p> Wrnugfft Irtm 

seed into good ground is he who in an honest and good 
heart having heard the word keepeth it, having heard 
he keepeth it. 



44 



1b?0 nni Inters 



LITTLE ROD OF MIDIAN 



And the Lord said unto him, what is that in thine hand? And 
he said, a rod. 

And he said, cast it on the ground. And he cast it on the 
ground. 

Exodus, iv : 2, 3. 



Thou shalt take this rod in thine hand wherewith thou shalt do 
signs. 

Exodus, iv: 17. 

1881. 



(§ 



LITTLE ROD OF MIDIAN 

N the slope of a hill fronting the morning sun 
was an acacia bush. One spring a green shoot 
started out and grew I should say about five 
feet long. Gradually it hardened into wood and was 
a corporate member in that bush. It had a place and 
share in bush-life and seemed to be filling it well. 
Suppose it had staid there forty years. All that while 
it -would be answering the purpose for which it grew, 
helping to round out and complete the Creator's ideal 
of a perfect acacia bush. So much for the first use and 
value of a stick. 

Now a second use is discovered. One day a man 
going by saw it there in the bush, fancied the style of 
it, stopped and cut it off and trimmed it as any boy 
would trim a stick to drive the cows up with. And 
then he went along switching it to and fro much 
pleased to see how well it was going to suit his 
purpose. Immediately now that stick has risen to 
new value. It was all right and doing well there 
where it grew in the bush, and might have staid there 
always to good purpose. But now it is coming to 
superior use, being in the hand of a man who will 

49 



$tjr Urmtgfjt Urun 

make it the instrument of his intelligence and turn it 
to the practical service of life; for by the charter of 
Eden every herb and tree is given to man for his use. 
There is the staff a lame man leans on, its beauty 
departed when it was cut out of the bush, but it has 
come to good use and honor. The other day I saw a 
child driving a barrel hoop with her stick, and I said, 
whether for hooping in flour or for giving glee to a girl 
the hoop and the stick too are counting for more than 
if green and graceful in the bush. This is a second use. 

Consider now a third one. The plain stick may 
presently come to be more than a mere tool. Its value 
may appear not in the every day use, but in some 
association or sentiment that has grown into it. 
There is a little stick in my study, and I dare say 
there is one somewhere belonging to you, not worth a 
a cent of itself but we wouldn't want it used for 
kindlings. One thing that set me on to this theme was 
a little rod of Midian that I cut years ago at the edge 
of an abandoned hermit's cave in Horeb. It was an 
almond rod, budded and blooming blossoms that same 
winter morning— lineal descendant as I reckoned of 
Aaron's rod that God ordered kept for a token in the 
tabernacle. Such a stick as that of Aaron's is elevated 
above all common values ; it has figured in the moral 
training of mankind and stands out for a sign over all 
generations. Belonging to the same family of sticks 
and memorable in sacred story is another one that 
comes to view at the second verse of Exodus, fourth 
chapter. And the Lord said unto Moses, what is that 
in thine hand ? And he said, a rod. 

Now this is that same which I was looking at — 
first as a green shoot starting out, then as a living 

50 



branch giving shapeliness to the bush, then as cut off 
for a switch or staff to herd sheep withal ; now finally 
wanted on new fields, unexpected ones, fields of Zoan, 
of moral ideas and conflicts. And its high mission 
isn't all fulfilled even there, nor at the Red Sea and the 
rock in Horeb. For every now and then in these busy 
times of ours this same little rod of Midian is taken 
hold of and lifted up by somebody for a talk on uses 
and powers and values ; for a token to men even now 
that something is in their hands that God wants 
considered and turned to best use. 

This apparently is the primer lesson that God is 
giving Moses. He is going to fetch in a rod that all 
the world shall wonder at. Where in the world can it 
be? Right there in Moses' hand; a mere sheep-stick, 
and as I am thinking, not a nice new shapely one 
either, but quite likely an old battered one that has 
been carried around ever so long. Moses must know 
the virtues and powers that are in an old stick used 
under direction. 

It is a tough problem that he is brooding these 
days in the lonely backside of the desert. How shall 
his oppressed people be gotten out of Egypt, with 
what weapons shall they come? Weapons — it needs 
only one, and that one is in his hand now. But the 
power isn't in it yet, and will not be till he does exactly 
what God tells him to. Perhaps he will have to throw 
it away, then take it again. Perhaps it will act like a 
snake, then be the old familiar stick again. The main 
thing is that he must obey orders and learn the use and 
value of some common little thing handled in the fear 
of God. 

Now isn't that forever true of whatever thing one 

5' 



®Ip> Unmgtjt Irim 

has in hand any hour of the day. Why it is nothing 
amounting to much, he may say. Very likely, yet in 
most cases being the tool he works with, it amounts 
to a living for himself and family. That is something. 
And frequently there's more. The brush of Abbey, 
Macmonnie's graving tool, the wires of Edison get 
them distinction. And there's more yet, for if one 
handles what's in hand as he ought, he will in that 
very way be shaping himself to best use and increasing 
the value of the world. 

So we may say that the old question is still out. 
What is that in thine hand? A serious question too, 
for it is from God, a question to set one thinking just 
what he is handling or doing, and what it all is for. 
If that in hand is counterfeit money, or a glass of 
strong drink for a drink, or a bad book or picture, the 
hand had better be cut off than keep hold thereof. Or 
if in thine hand is a good pen writing what is false, a 
clean book for ponying out a school lesson, a knifeblade 
defacing public property, be ashamed of that. Take 
any of the ordinary things that we find in our hands — 
a stick, a tool, a ticket, a pencil, a piece of money; 
a newspaper, arithmetic, testament; just everyday 
things but a great deal of life and character is in the 
every day handling of them. 

There's always the plain ordinary thing and the 
extraordinary something behind it. It surprised the 
Caliph that Djablu's simitar was so inferior looking 
but when Djablu's hand was behind the hilt it was 
anything but inferior. Lincoln's pen may have been 
as homely as he, but righteousness went into it and 
forth from it went emancipation. There was the 
sheep-stick in Moses' hand, it wasn't polished up nor 



5 2 



straightened nor feruled nor carved nor bejeweled nor 
any way made more presentable so as to compete in 
style with the sceptre of Egypt; but a process was 
gone thro, and at the other end of that the stick of 
Midian came out ahead of anything ever heard of on 
this planet before. 

It must have been a remarkable process. One 
would like to know the secret of that thing. Suppose 
we interrogate the rod. 

Little rod, what is the secret of thy powers? 
Doing what is told me. Is that all? Yes. Tell us 
about it. Why, I began as a bud, something told me 
to grow, so I pushed myself up five feet or so, and 
there I flourished in the upper air and enjoyed it, 
waving green leaves, playing with my fellows in the 
bush. Then one day something told me to lean over 
and I did so, and a man's sharp knife went hard into 
me to get me out of the bush where I wanted to stay. 
After that I was a rod in Moses' hand to do what he 
told me. 

That's sufficient little rod, no more questions to a 
rod, for now we've come to the point where obedience 
will be intelligent, will know why it submits to orders 
and does the thing that is commanded. 

Ho, Moses, what is that in thine hand? A rod. 
Cast it to the ground, says a voice. Now it has the 
undulations of a snake. Put forth thine hand and 
take it by the tail. Now it is a rod again, the same old, 
worn sheep-stick. Not just the same either, for since 
the doing of that which was commanded, new 
possibilities wait on the use of it. The world will hear 
someday about a little rod of Midian. 

Now in this process of obeying orders, which to be 

53 



sure, is'nt always to one's mind, lies the very secret 
of all powers and successes. You remember what the 
centurion said at Capernaum ; I also am a man under 
authority. Because he held himself obedient under 
command, he was fitted to give command. It is so 
with us all. By obedience to the laws of life one gets 
command, facility, skill in doing things. Life, like the 
musical instrument, gives out its full tones and powers 
to the touch that is sympathetic, appreciative and 
obedient to discipline. It is by gifts of genius plus 
docility, discipline and submission to rule, that 
masteries are won on any field. 

Say, Mister, what is that in your hand? A rod. 
What are those things drawn across it ? Strong hairs. 
What do you do with your rod ? Obey the rule, practice 
and drill. Then it came to pass that the little rod of 
Ole Bull was charged with powder and command. It 
was a royal wand ; all he needed to do was to lift it 
and men flocked under it. A British earl gave him a 
diamond. He set it in the end of his rod, so when he 
played men saw the play of a diamond. It was a 
diamonded rod. But nobody cared for that. Except 
the master had been obedient to discipline that rod had 
never been known nor diamonded. 

That time the thing in hand was congenial ; it suits 
me well, the musician might have said — I like it. But 
another time it may be a thing one doesn't like; no 
inspiration in it, no music nor poetry to begotten out of 
it. What are you doing and what have you in hand ? 
Plenty of hard-working people have to reply, just my 
job, nothing interesting to me; and we can see how 
often enough that must be so. The hoe is a hoe, call it 
that; the dish-cloth is not picturesque; your column 

54 



3teB and Jtotomi 

of figures on the ledger does not suggest the Corinthian 
column; I do not recall that arithmetic or Latin 
grammar are particularly fascinating to a growing 
boy. A good share of life is spent doing things we 
do not really enjoy, or perhaps would like to be relieved 
of. What are these things in hand for then, in so far 
as they're not welcome ? 

Now I wonder if it may not be one part of a divine 
ordering for obedience of another sort ? We obey 
when we adjust ourselves gracefully to providential 
allotments. It pleases us to see the boy stick to his 
fractions till he gets his powers that way. It pleases 
God that you and I do cheerfully the tasks that front 
us each hour of the day, putting soul and conscience 
into them. In that case we shall take more out than 
we put in, for not only do our cordial fidelities in that 
which is least please the Master, they also drill our 
spirits to best uses and powers. What we do is more 
than the thing done; it is spiritual capital gained by 
doing it upon honor and with good heart. 

A man was telling me yesterday of a four days' 
piece of work he finished last week. I didn't make 
anything worth while out of it, said he, but then, I 
would sooner have lost money on it than not do it 
all right and to suit. Now I'm sure we shall agree that 
he did make something well worth while, he made 
more of himself, his deposit was in the bank of 
character that day, and the merchandise of that is 
better than silver; costlier too sometimes, even to 
reversing one's plan of life. 

Ho, young prince in the palace of Pharaoh, what is 
that you are carrying so grandly? The baton of the 
house of Rameses, for I'm of the royal family. Cast it 

55 



®ff* Wrought Irun 

to the ground, says a mysterious impulse, cast it down. 
And prince Amosis cast it — and for forty years he is 
in the lonely wilderness of Midian. Being obedient to 
the will of God, he refuses to be called any longer the 
son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to suffer 
affliction with the people of God. One doesn't 
make that choice against all human nature without 
a stout pull and manly purpose, but the supreme 
will that requires it will brace the will that moves 
toward that decision. It was so when Moses lorsook 
the pleasures and treasures of Egypt ; that very hour 
his reinforcements arrived, and thereafter he endured as 
seeing him who is invisible. 

Serving God begins with surrender of one's sell to 
God and endures in the strength that is distilled into 
life from the invisible. One seems to be praying into 
vacant air; not so, he is talking with God, making 
contact, drawing powers into his soul from the unseen. 
Then after awhile it comes around that whatever he 
handles or operates will begin to take on meanings and 
powers not suspected hitherto. It may require time 
but the day shall declare it. 

Ho, Prince Amosis, what is that in thine hand ? The 
baton of the house of Rameses. Cast it down! And he 
cast it. 

Forty Years' Silence. 
Take it again ! And Moses put forth his hand and 
took it, to wit, the rod, and with it all the powers that 
the baton of Rameses ever stood for. These and more 
too are in the Midian sheep-stick now. This in the 
hand of the obedient man is a storage battery equal to 
any demand — trip-hammering Egypt or cutting a sea 
in twain or touching rocks into water springs. 

56 



Bj0#a atti JtatorB 

So much for some practical workings of obedience. 
It pays well, and if it didn't it is the thing to do all 
the same. Conforming, as Bryant saw under the calm 
shades of the forest, conforming the order of our lives 
to the beautiful order of God's works, and so arriving 
at our best estate. 

For thro obedience we get our uses, our powers; 
under obedience we are able to round out the pattern 
of life that God sets for us; enforcing obedience on 
ourselves we help to make the world orderly, dignified, 
prosperous and stable. Reverence for law will rid us 
of anarchism in all of its large or small varieties; 
obedience to the golden rule will be the sure settling 
of industrial turmoil; Christian honor insisted on, 
advances property values ; tools do their best work 
under loyalty to God's will; the pen that is responsive 
to divine ideas will write the world's enduring poetry; 
silks are going to sell well where truth is written on 
the yard-rod, for trade like water must follow the 
channel of least resistance to God's appointed way. 

So ordering their small affairs under God's rule, men 
may any time find their affairs lifted into partnership 
with God's great ones, as the staff was that Moses 
carried. On the other hand a false note destroys the 
harmony, some wrong thing lurking in the heart 
obstructs the current of power. 

Ho, Gehazi, what is that in thy hand? The 
prophet's staff, what will you do with it? I'll work 
a miracle at Shunem. But when this extempore 
miracle-man gets there and applies the staff it doesn't 
work. Why should it ? What good powers could any 
man of his mean spirit get out of that or of anything 
else. 



57 



Wqt Unwgljt Srtm 

Ho again, Gehazi, what is that in thy hand this 
time, up there in the tower? Two bags of silver. 
What are you going to do with it ? I'm going to be a 
rich man. Yes, all that silver secreted in the tower, 
and on thyself and thy children after thee white 
leprosy. In thy hand the staff of power is powerless 
and the coveted silver is a curse, for thy heart is not 
right in the sight of God. 

No Bible writer ever said that money was the root 
of all evil, but what is that in thy hand, thou man of 
greed and avarice? All the world knows what it is; 
it is money perverted from noble uses and powers to 
work soul-killing deceit or stinginess; it is a rod of 
unrighteousness, lineal descendant as I reckon, of 
magicians' rods that did so with their enchantments 
on the field of Zoan, the baton of the money -getter 
calling forth serpent broods of lies, swindlings, frauds, 
oppressions, crimes and woes. 

This is one way, but if money be in a man's hand 
under right direction how noble its uses for sustaining 
and adorning life ! What powers of beneficence folded 
up in it, like buds and blooms and almonds in the dry 
rod that Aaron's name was on! What is in hand 
means much; how held and used means more. 

Say, such a one, what have you in hand this 
Sunday morning? A Bible. Very good; that's a thing 
to be handled thoughtfully, for if you read it not 
obeying, there's the greater condemnation. It is a 
plain little book, not two inches thro from lid to lid, 
nevertheless it is high as heaven, deep as hell ; salvation 
is in it, perdition too, if one despise the grace it brings. 
Hide God's word in your heart and your life will 
become God's living word, a new translation exactly 

58 



fitted to the people you live with. They will learn 
from you the uses, the powers of a little book that 
tells a great story. 

Yea, have ye never read therein of One who 
carried all powers in his hand ? And have ye marked 
this — that he was in no haste to outgrow subjection 
to his mother, that he did alway the things that 
pleased the Father, that he learned obedience by the 
things he suffered, that he became obedient even unto 
death ? He made himself a total sacrifice to the law of 
love. Thereafter his hand held the powers of life and 
the keys of death and the opening of the kingdom of 
heaven to all believers. 

As with him the Master of life, so with us all as 
disciples learning from him the uses and powers of life. 
It isn't a question of some one thing or other held 
between thumb and finger, but the deeper question of 
what we are, thro the disciplines of our years, what 
powers of soul we carry and how used. 

So I am asking now, what is that which you hold 
in your own self? what gift or talent have you in 
hand? what capability or influence, what charge to 
keep have you? Nothing to speak of, you may say; 
not worth much at the best. Now if you insist upon it 
we'll allow for once that that is so. You're not good 
for much, not worth much, cannot do much, a mere 
stick among the branches of humanity. 

Very well, God has a way of turning sticks to use, 
getting powers into them, making insignificant ones 
famous. He likes to make strong men out of weak 
ones, very useful lives out of common folk. He can 
use all kinds, only they must be usable. Moses at 
court is gifted, cultured, princely; reckons himself equal 

59 



Sty* Wtmxgtfi Irtm 

to a splendid dash for the freedom of his people, but his 
scheme doesn't work — perhaps it needs forty years 
with a sheep-stick to show that for great undertakings 
God hath chosen foolish things, yea things despised, 
that no flesh should glory in his presence. 

God has use for the great man as soon as he 
gets down from his greatness and is docile and 
meek-spirited, but he has a thousand times more use 
for the multitudes of average people who are not great 
except in docility and kindliness. He is using these by 
the ten thousand in all sorts of places every day of the 
year ; thro them he multiplies streams of blessing like 
brooks in Horeb running from the touch of a little rod. 
Thus undistinguished people are worked into most 
important uses. Out of ordinary material, just the 
every-day human stuff, a sort of spiritual nobility is 
erected. In this noble order he is greatest that 
serve th. 

Do you not know that most of the finest 
accomplishments, the sublimest heroisms of the 
passing days are never announced in the newspapers ; 
it suffices that they are written in God's book. It will 
all come out in the great day; a little cup of cold 
water is painted into the record; those that are 
faithful in that which is least, will be wanted over ten 
cities. 

I salute them now, unknown by name, hid in 
sequestered places, distributing cheer and good will, 
not leaders in the fashionable world but diamonded in 
the judgment. 

Say, good friend, what is that you are carrying? 
Just a common life. Very good. Cast it down in 
obedience. This is what the Saviour did every day; 

60 



3|jg?j0 anil ftotors 

he laid down his life that he might take it again. 
Cast your life down in love before God. Lo, that act 
of loyalty makes it more than common, transforms 
and dignifies it. Now take it again. Lo, it is a new 
life, inspired, empowered, set to the great marches of 
God. 

Little rod of Midian, it is a good lesson we have 
studied this time — uses and powers by the way of 
obedience. We would learn that lesson well and 
practice it every day. That's sufficient little rod. 



61 



®tjr Mml jif X\\t foal*. 



A just balance and scales are the Lord's. 

Prov. xvi : 11, R. V. 

1886. 



2ty* Mml of ttye 0rale 



A BALANCE is useful for weighing, also it is 
suggestive of an idea. Some things which men 
make have no higher significance than utility ; 
they are useful, but not elegant nor likely to figure in 
the realm of ideas. You do not get any ideal truth or 
principle out of a cook stove, a refrigerator, a cast 
iron plow. These are indispensable conveniences in 
practical life, but they have no place in the vocabulary 
of high thought and sentiment. 

Suppose now we look at a scale. The sort referred 
to often in the Bible, the old even balance which has 
come down to us it may be from before the flood. Do 
we not see in that something more than a handy 
contrivance ? Useful it certainly is in traffic, but useful 
on a higher plane as representing a principle. The 
balance is itself a symbol of just and honorable 
dealing. It stands for fairness and truthfulness in all 
transactions, for that which always ought to be. It 
represents an ideal thing, and that is why it has 
figured not only in the market place, but in poetry, 
mythology, art, religion. 

65 



OJfj? Urnagiji Snm 

Job cannot better declare his integrity than by 
saying, let me be weighed in an even balance. No 
Egyptian could hope to stand accepted of Osiris in the 
judgment, except his life weighed well in the scales of 
Horus. Even to this day, the devout Moslem sees in 
the Mosque of Omar at Jerusalem, the sacred balance 
in which the souls of men will be tried over against 
the Valley of Jehoshaphat. The balance is surely more 
than a convenience in trade. It has taken its place 
among emblems of truth. Absolute justness, equipoise 
of character, the right balance of things have revealed 
themselves on its delicate pivots. And the merchandise 
of these is better than the merchandise of silver, and 
the gain thereof than fine gold. 

But where were these ideas found in the first place ? 
Men made the scales, but who made the idea of equity 
and of exactness that caused men to feel the need of 
scales and then to lift them up to the rank of emblems ? 
The ancients were in the right direction of an answer 
when they hung the figure of the balance in the hand 
of a goddes'i. To their minds the even balance was a 
divine idea. 

So it is to ours. We have read in our Scripture that 
a just balance and scales are the Lord's. The idea 
which they suggest to us, originated with him. The 
balance and the scales were the Lord's before they were 
ours, and they will be his forever. Every operation of 
the scales is a declaration to us of God's sense of equity. 
It is not strictly true that men have invented scales. 
They have discovered that which God originated, and 
turned it to practical use. The balance and scales are 
the Lord's; the original pattern is his, all his affairs 
are conducted on the principle of exact relations which 

66 



®fj? Mztxl of % g>ttxh 

the scale typifies. When he swings out a planet it is 
accurately poised. A just balance of forces pulling 
against each other holds each globe in place. For 
thousands of years the constellation Libra has visibly 
represented to human imagination 

" his golden scales, yet seen 



Betwixt Astreea and the Scorpion sign, 
Wherein all things created first he weighed, 
The pendulous round earth with balanced air 
In counterpoise." * * * 

It was at the autumnal equinox, when days and nights 
just balance each other, that the sign of Libra was 
entered on the ancient Zodiac. The astrologers were 
on the right track. Had Isaiah been among them he 
would have told how God hath 

" Measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, 
And meted out heaven with the span, 
And comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, 
And weighed the mountains in scales, 
And the hills in a balance." 

God founded his universe as it were with a balance. 
His work of creation proceeded on this principle of 
equipoise. When he hung out his invisible scales, the 
waters were divided; the waters that were under the 
firmament balanced the waters that were above the 
firmament, and it was so. On one side of the scale 
was day with its hum of life arid energy ; on the other, 
night and rest, throughout all generations. Over 
against the families of plants, of trees and herbs that 
breathe through their leaves, God set the families of 
moving creatures that breathe with lungs, so that 
each should breathe what the other could not, and 
God saw that it was good. And there was evening 

67 



(Sty Wmmty Irim 

and there was morning, the sixth day, and behold, all 
things were in an even balance. And God rested from 
the work which he had made. 

Now perhaps you will be asking what about 
human life— is that in good balance ? Apparently not. 
Something has happened. We are not in Eden today. 
A great shock of disobedience has thrown us out of 
equilibrium. What confusion and upsetting of the 
ancient repose, as though 



-God bid his angels turn askance 



The poles of earth twice ten degrees and more 
From the sun's axle," 

to indicate how sin had disarranged his perfect order. 

We must not forget to take account of this 
whenever we try to balance up the actual experience 
of life. Disobedience before God is an awfully heavy 
weight in the scale against us. We shall make poor 
work of it trying to satisfy ourselves with what is, 
if we under-reckon the weight of sin. Men say, how 
do you explain to us the doctrine that God is just, in 
the face of all he has let come to pass ? I do not seek 
to answer, the answer is with God. But let us keep 
two things in mind; first, the sin that has defiled us, 
second, the grace that saves us, and that has eternity 
in which to adjust the balance. In the light of the 
darkness that lay on Calvary, I reckon the sufferings 
of this present time accurately weighed in a true scale. 
It is easy to be staggered at some movements of the 
beam along our short horizon. But what are we? 
What do we know ? Hearken Job ! Dost thou know 
the balancings of the clouds ? much less of human life. 



68 



"For, take thy ballaunce, if thou be so wise, 
And weigh the light that in the East doth rise. 
Or weigh the thought that from man's mind doth flow, 
But if the weight of this thou canst not show, 
Then how canst thou those greater secrets know 
That dost not know the least thing of them all." 

"Whatever thing is done, by Him is donne, 
Ne any may His soveraine power shonne, 
nor weigh His workes anew." 

His work is perfect, a God of truth, just and right 
is he. A just balance and scales are the Lord's. 
Therefore will not we fear, tho the earth be removed, 
tho the mountains be carried into the heart of the sea. 

If the just balance and scales are the Lord's ideally, 
typifying his accurate adjustment of all things, then 
whoever first devised a balance for practical use 
between men, was operating along the line of God's 
thought. He may have been one of that ancient family 
of a mechanical turn, sons of Zillah, artificers in brass 
and iron. We do not know. But we know that when 
Abraham the friend of God was transacting business 
among the sons of Heth with religious accuracy, he 
weighed out the four hundred shekels of silver in the 
balance to Ephron the Hittite, and the field and the 
cave therein and all the trees round about were made 
sure unto Abraham for a possession of a burying place, 
by the sons of Heth. During thousands of years that 
primitive balance stood betwixt man and man. It 
facilitated business, it declared that equity should rule 
in trade. Yea, amongst the heathen traffickers, was 
the figure of Astraea, the goddess with the scales in her 
hands. 

But the ways of men change, tho the just rule never 
changes. The old balance was not enough for the new 

69 



®ij* Wrnuglft Iran 

commerce. The steelyard of Rome was not equal to 
the needs of today. When the age of business energy 
was fully come, it required a superior scale — a scale 
commensurate with the merchandise of continents — 
a scale equivalent to the ponderous machinery of 
factories — a scale that could lift up a loaded train in 
the balance as a very little thing. 

Then God sent into the world a man who should 
think his thoughts after him, and introduce a change 
in the ways of weighing that had been in use for 
millenniums. He led on the mind of his servant from 
one device to another; along imaginary queer-shaped 
levers, over knife-edges, up perpendicular rods, amongst 
poises and beams and loops; till at length, gradually 
outlining itself thro the darkness came the combination 
of levers that makes the platform scale of today, over 
which rolls the traffic of the world. This curious 
balance and scale was the Lord's. The man when he 
first caught sight of it felt it was the Lord's, not man's, 
and whatever might come of it should be to the honor 
of God. 

One night last week, being wide awake, I seemed 
to see something. It certainly was not a dream. I 
should say it was a vision seen by the mind, coming all 
at once, so swiftly and completely, that, lest I should 
fall asleep and lose something of it I straightway got 
up and put the outlines thereof on paper. 

I seemed to see, amidst the darkness, the scale, 
which God, not man, had set up. A certain weight 
was hung from the beam. It was not marked in 
pounds and ounces, but with the ancient Hebrew 
character— iysh. 



7o 



®ip> iteal of % g>mU 

Iysh means — a man. I saw that here it marked 
the weight of a man's best self. It seemed to be the 
index of God's plan for one man, the ideal of what 
God wished one man to be. As tho God had set 
that weight on the beam ami said, now shall it be seen 
whether this one man shall fulfil my purpose, and, 
according to his ability, balance this weight Iysh, or 
whether it shall be writ of him some future day, lekel, 
thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting. 

Then I saw in my waking vision a man slowly, 
carefully toiling thro long years to lay on the platform 
of that scale, qualities and attainments that should 
balance the ideal of life which God was gradually 
unfolding to him. I do not say that he succeeded. I 
only recognized the fact that he was aiming to fulfil 
an ideal. 

Meantime I noticed that the first thing which 
appeared on his side of the balance was a spirit of 
Reverence toward God. It seemed as if the vanishing 
figure of a pious mother was hovering near to make 
sure that this worshipfulness and simple faith in God 
should become the earliest and centremost fact in that 
life. Also it seemed to me that when that sentiment 
of veneration, and of early piety went on to the scale, 
the beam thereof moved perceptibly. 

Presently I saw in my vision how the man was 
putting something else on the scale. And when I could 
read what was written thereon, it was tabnith, Pattern. 
And I saw it meant that the man did things according 
to the patterns. It meant that he was very exact in 
whatsoever he did, or wanted done. He might have 
been called a pattern-maker, only that I think the 
patterns were given him on some mount of superior 

7i 



vision, and that a still voice was saying in his soul, 
see that thou do all things according to the pattern 
shewed thee. Consequently with him, it made a great 
difference whether a thing was pretty nearly right, or 
right. If it was pretty nearly right it was wrong, and 
must be done over again, and yet again, and again, 
till just right. Only so, could he become a workman 
that needeth not to be ashamed, approved unto God; 
for this rule in mechanics was the rule in religion also, 
and in religion first of all. 

Soon I saw another element showing itself on the 
scale. It had the appearance of persistence, Firm Will. 
Would you call it pertinacity ? wilfulness ? Hardly 
that, if one's face is seriously set in the right direction. 
To bring life up to the standard hung on the beam 
would require a life habit of persistence, a stiff holding 
on to the thing in hand. If a young foundryman 
drawing a load of pig-iron forty miles, is brought up 
suddenly after dark in the mud by a broken axle, we 
should say he had better find the nearest shelter and 
quietly wait for daylight. But if on the contrary, 
going in to the neighboring thicket he shall get down a 
young tree, trim it and shape it with his pocket knife 
to the hub of his wheel, brace up the load, attach the 
new-made axle-tree, and drive on thro the mud so as 
to reach home by daylight, we shall infer there must 
be in that young plow-maker some of the stuff that 
makes weight in the scale. And if in later life it be 
found that he is not easily baffled, but quietly takes 
hold of difficulties and holds on persistently, making 
everything out of nothing, we shall come to like it as 
an element of dignity and strength. We shall think it 
right for such a man to hold his matured opinions 

72 



Sty> Steal nf % §>mh 

strongly. Perhaps he has learned to see farther than 
some do, and if a mistake or harmless foible falls out 
here or there we shall not be in haste to pick it up and 
publish it. 

Now I saw in my vision that the man of firm will 
was also loading up the scale with a goodly bulk of 
Gentleness. He believed that the servant of the Lord 
must not strive, but be gentle unto all men, especially 
if any chance to disagree with him. Thus it came to 
pass that vague prejudices creeping up now and then 
like a fog, melted away and were no more. The edge 
of criticism was sure to be turned by a soft answer. 

His speech did not appear to be rapid, nor his use 
of words forceful, but uniformly 



-an accent very low 

— and a most silver flow 



Of subtle-paced counsel, 

Winning its way with extreme gentleness." 

Now in the old Bible, conversation signifies behavior, 
and without doubt this conversation, life-long behavior 
was according to the gospel of Christ ; eminent for the 
fifth of the fruits of the spirit which is gentleness. 

Moreover I marked another quality enlarging 
itself upon the scale, as the years went by. On it was 
the lettering, thrice repeated, Nadtb, and I straightway 
saw it to be by interpretation that which was spoken 
by Esaias the prophet — the liberal deviseth liberal 
things and in liberal things shall he continue. It was 
not that silver and gold were being weighed out on 
that scale. Every one knows that they are heavy, 
also that they count nothing in making up the weight 
of Iysh, a man. The Lord hath use for silver and gold, 
corruptible things, wrought into benefactions. But in 

73 



2% Utougfjt Srtm 

the scale that indicates the Lord's will about a man, it 
is the liberal spirit that weighs much. Therefore it 
happens that the poor weigh more in the balance 
sometimes, than the rich ; for if there be first a willing 
mind it is accepted as weight in this reckoning 
according to that a man hath, and not according to 
that he hath not. Now I was sure that, according as 
God had prospered him, the man at the scale was a 
cheerful giver, the same whom God loveth; whiles by 
the experiment of this ministration he glorified God in 
professed subjection unto the gospel of Christ. 

I will tell of another thing, which, if my vision was 
true, the man never failed to have on the scale in large 
weight — in double weight, SS if I might so say — 
Simplicity and godly Sincerity. In the midst of great 
prosperity it never appeared that he was spoiled. 
Unexpected success did not throw him off balance. 
One could not see that the smell of the fire of vanity 
had passed over him. A writer once said that he 
would walk a weary journey to the utmost verge of 
the big world to kiss the hand of the man who in the 
height of prosperity and honors would 

" Preserve a lowly mind ; and to his God, 
Feeling the sense of his own littleness — 
Be as a child in meek simplicity." 

I think it would have pleased that writer to see the 
vision of the scale and the man thereat. Affixed to the 
man's person he might discover imperial insignia put 
there once by other hands than his ; decorations from 
oriental courts or from the land of the white elephant ; 
he might even be tempted to salute him, Sir Knight! 
or Commander-el-Iftikar ! But the earnest, demure 
face of the man would forbid that, and before long it 

74 



Stye 3Jtoal of X\\t g>tnlt 

would appear that the decoration most prized by him 
was not the knightly cross nor the barbaric cypher, 
but that other one which is not corruptible, even the 
ornament of a meek and quiet spirit which is in the 
sight of God, of great price; which is on the scale, of 
great weight. Most certainly the scale beam indicated 
this as the testimony of his conscience, that in 
simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom 
but by the grace of God he had his life-conversation 
in the world. 

The vision did not pass till I had seen one thing 
more — distinctly. Over all the toil of ninety years to 
balance that scale aright, was written this inscription, 

The life which I now live in the flesh 

I live by faith in the Son of God, 

Who loved me and gave himself for me. 

This was the last that appeared that night; but 
shortly I caught from somewhere the sound of a sweet 
salutation, the same that floated over the waters of 
Hiddekel long while ago, as if One said — man, unto 
thee am I now sent, for thou art greatly beloved. And 
now thou shalt rest and stand in thy lot at the end of 
days. 

In the morning I knew that a soul had passed,* 
whose work at the scale was done. I do not say he 
filled out the ideal set before him or balanced the 
weight set on the beam. I know he tried to. 

May each of us aim to fill out according to our 
capacity the full character-weight of one soul, on the 
just balance and scales which are the Lord's. 

* Sir Thaddeus Fairbanks ; senior member of the South Church. 



75 



A #gmplj0mj 



Bless ye the Lord, all ye his hosts ! 

Ye ministers of his 

That do his pleasure. 
Bless the Lord, all his works, 
In all places of his dominion. 

Bless the Lord, O my Soul. 

Psalm, ciii : 21, 22. 

Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present 
themselves before the Lord. 

Job, i:6. 

Again there was a day when the sons of God came to present 
themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them. 

And the Lord said unto Satan— from whence contest thou ? And 
Satan answered the Lord and said— from going to and fro in the 
earth and from walking up and down in it. 

Job, ii: 1,2. 

1893. 



A $gtnptpmg 



1 



T is a symphony of service that I am thinking of- 
the interplay of lives that are loyal to God. As 

" mind and soul according well 

May make one music," 



so may the blending of many wills toward one high 
accomplishment — the total effect will be harmonious 
like that of an orchestra. In fact, as a critic of music 
has pointed out, the orchestral symphony is itself a play 
of life, interpreting in its mingling strains not only 
man's emotions, but also his toils, experiences and 
victories. 

Extend this conception and we have a stage wide 
as creation, and performers as many as all the loyal 
sons of God, each with a part of his own to carry — 
and thus the true symphony, the universal one of 
worlds and of ages. 

This, you may say is fanciful — very likely. It is the 
statement in kindred terms of the familiar fancy of 

79 



Wqt 3fcmgfjt Irtm 

modern poetry — the whole creation moving to one 
far-off divine event. Poetry follows faith when it 
sings the beautiful order of God's works. Nor is this 
idea altogether modern. To the same key the old 
bards of Israel pitched their notes. A waft from one 
of them has floated down to us, 

" Bless ye the Lord, all ye his hosts, 
Ye ministers of his that do his pleasure 
In all places of his dominion." 

By the side of this I have set a bit of stage scenery 
from the prologue to the drama of Job. It is pictorially 
suggestive, not to be taken as a record of something 
that happened once and again, but as the poetic 
statement of a great truth, namely, that in the 
spiritual sphere all present themselves before the Lord 
awaiting orders, or again, returning to some family 
reunion or rehearsal, have something more to report 
than saunterings, walking up and down and going to 
and fro somewhere. 

And the style of the prologue lets us hear imaginary 
interrogations addressed to this or that one — whence 
comest thou ? hast thou considered my servant such a 
one in earth or in the outmost planet ? hast thou gone 
thro the chambers of the south? or hast thou heard 
the chorus of my sweet singers in the cluster of the 
Pleiades ? 

This, you say, is rather fanciful. Yes, and so is a 
good part of all that lifts or inspires us — poetry, psalm, 
drama, parable, celestial vision. Most likely Marlboro 
was correct in saying that he got more veritable 
English history from the plays of Shakespeare than 
from the books ; not the exactness of facts, but more 

80 



of the spirit and stately movement of old Britain. So 
here and elsewhere in the Bible, notably on its last 
pages, we are treated to dramatic play with scenery 
wholly imaginative, yet of the same spiritual 
significance as that which we ourselves are in and part 
of. These sons of God are unlike any we ever saw, yet 
not altogether unlike us in structure nor in destination, 
for they and we are sons of the same Father, actors in 
the same drama of spiritual things, each in a way 
appointed to parts in the same high symphony of 
service. 

Considerable play for our thought is allowed in 
that family reception that is pictured on a day and 
again on a day. With a sense acute like Paxton 
Hood's one might be catching voices transmitted thro 
the wireless blue — 

Uriel— 1, Regent of the sun, have found by what way light is 
parted and I have seen the sitting of the seven colors and the arching 
of the bow in the balancings of the clouds, and I praise the beauty 
of thy works and await thy will. 

Yophiel—1 have skirted the firmaments and marked the unfurling 
of streamers of light: I have seen the fire-mists whirling out of 
darkness and ancient void, and a new world taking form where thy 
will shall be done as it is in heaven. 

Lucifer— I descended the slope that points toward the new world. 
And I went to and fro in the earth and walked up and down in it. 
And I found there a garden planted eastward and a mist going up 
and curious trees therein but no inhabitant. Nor do I understand 
how any great glory can be displayed on so inferior a world as that, 
tho I do remember now that all the sons of God shouted when thou 
layedst the foundations thereof. 

Cherubim — We are they who were stationed east of Eden to keep 
the way of life and make it plain to men. Thither Abel brought his 
offering and God had respect unto him, and there mercy and truth 
did meet and justice and peace kissed each other. 

Michael— -In a valley of Moab over against Beth Peor smote I 
Satan contending for the body of Moses : moreover unto Joshua, son 



81 



Stye Urougljt Irtm 

of Nun, said I, be strong and of good courage : and on whatsoever 
field the Lord of Hosts shall appoint will Michael and his angels 
fight the dragon and his angels. 

Raphael— Thro the wheels of the ringed world that men call 
Saturn, I led the quiring bands down the ladder of light, and over 
Bethlehem we sounded glory to God, good will to men: and to One 
in the likeness of man pledge I the loyalty of Raphael and twelve 
legions of angels. 

This, you say, is altogether fanciful. Yes, but after 
the manner of scripture, and intended to group in one 
scheme of dramatis personam sons of God of more 
worlds than one. It is no creation of fancy but strictly 
true that we and they are in the same combination, 
under the same polity, looking on the same creation, 
operating the same forces cosmical and spiritual, 
working toward the same results — unless one out of 
sorts is only going to and fro in the earth and walking 
up and down in it with doubts and cynicisms. 

Moreover if some of the transactions of the elder 
sons are on a scale above what we are adjusted to, 
some others, as reported, are within our easy reach. 
One of them is said to have assisted an outcast woman 
on the desert to where she could refill her water-skin ; 
another one seems to have fired some coals and baked 
a cake for Elijah. The grandeur of these performances 
is not overpowering tho done by celestial powers. You 
and I would be just as capable as they of lending a 
hand to some poor body stranded in a wilderness of 
trouble or down flat under a juniper of despond. Any 
average person could bake a loaf or carry one that 
somebody else has baked where it would do the most 
good. In the old Bible stories I see ministries of angels 
and men mingling in one wonderful order which is 
withal a true symphony of service. 

82 



Nor is this all, for from here and there I see other 
actors emerge and set themselves to certain parts in 
the service tho never capable of knowing why they do 
it. Look this way and I will show you pictorial 
shapes of flying things and beasts of the field, yea also 
whatsoever passeth thro the paths of the seas, moving 
straight up to some determinate spot or performance 
as if under orders, and in the march with Michael and 
all angels. 

Who is this advancing at the front of the Israelitish 
host? This, it is said, is the angel sent with them to 
drive out the Amorite and Canaanite. And what is 
this, advancing in the front of the Israelitish host? 
This, it is said, is the hornet sent with them to drive 
out the Hivite and Hittite. Angel and hornet, 
whatever this hornet be, mustered into the same 
company going up on the same business. So, too, w^ent 
angel and raven when they took turns feeding God's 
prophet, the Tishbite. 

And now if there were a day when the dumb 
creatures of God could present themselves intelligently 
before their sovereign, and their tongues be loosed to 
report their obedience, I should expect to get some 
interesting messages across the line. 

I should hear the hornet reporting how he and his 
swarm stung the uncircumcised Hivite; the frog how 
he took his station, as commanded, in the dough of the 
kneading-troughs of Egypt; the cows of Ekron how 
they pulled the cart with the ark of God up the straight 
way to Bethshemesh lowing as they went because they 
wanted their calves ; the lion of Benjamin how he slew 
the Judahite but took not a mouthful out of him ; the 
Mesopotamian worm how she crawled up east of 

S3 



QJlje WravaUft Irtm 

Nineveh and gnawed down the gourd that Jonah sat 
under; the caterpillar how he enlisted in God's great 
army of palmer-worms, canker-worms, locusts and 
caterpillars ; the fish of Tarshish how he landed Jonah 
safely, and the fish of Tiberias how he bit at Peter's 
hook and delivered to him the silver coin for taxes ; the 
donkey whereon yet never man sat, how he stood a 
long while where two ways met till some men came 
along and said that the Master had need of him. This, 
you say, is fanciful. Certainly, and for a purpose. 

These mingling shapes terrestrial and celestial I've 
thrown for a moment on the canvas of our thought to 
bring more clearly into view the Bible conception of a 
management that guides into one harmony all grades 
of intelligence and of life. Looked at from this point 
of view the scheme of the great Director is taken up by 
all these multitudinous parts playing harmoniously 
together, insomuch that I speak of it now as a 
universal symphony of service. And, if you listen, a 
strain of the far away chant will sound again in your 
soul as tho the morning stars sang together and many 
sons of God shouted, cheering one another on: 

"Bless ye the Lord, all ye his hosts, 
Ye ministers of his that do his pleasure : 
Bless the Lord, all his works 
In all places of his dominion." 

This is a high-going strain. I wonder if we got the 

whole of it? It almost seems as if something were 

lacking", as tho one distinctive note was needed to 

complete the score. Where then shall it come from? 

what quarter of the universe holds it ? who is equal to 

fetching it in ? I am — and I will sound it : 

" Bless the Lord my soul." 



Does this seem an intrusion, presumptuous, out of 
tune with the deep-mouthed music of the heavenlies? 
On the contrary it is the one missing note from many a 
life that is wanted to round up the perfect whole. The 
symphony of service is not complete so long as one 
wayward soul is out of it. Indeed the pivot of interest 
in all that's been coming up to view is not some winged 
spirit that excels in strength, but one that is un winged, 
standing on two feet, feeling very unfit and small and 
inadequate, but appointed all the same to carry a part 
in the great symphony and give answering refrain : 

"Bless the Lord my soul: 
And all that is within me, 
Do his pleasure." 

Not always however does he see it so. Sometimes 
he is going to and fro in the earth and up and down in 
it, doing nothing in particular; seeing what is going 
on, getting what amusement may be had for the 
money, shying off from trouble and responsibility 
about equally, with grave doubts as to the value of 
Christian institutions but never a doubt about the 
importance of having a good time. He said so plainly 
within my hearing on the train the other day: "I 
take things right end foremost, go where I can get the 
best, carry a season ticket to the pick of theatres, in 
with a splendid set of fellows with plenty of money 
and always sure of a good time." 

Somebody may ask if it is forbidden to have a good 
time. By no means. God wants everyone happy, but 
it's against the constitution of things that anyone 
should expend himself on himself alone and come out 
happy; he must contribute his full share of energy, 

85 



character and good will to the good of all, or he misses 
the main thing he was made for, and with that, all true 
satisfactions. To miss the mark is a Bible definition of 
sin. There's a lost chord and the symphony of service 
is not complete. Modern science is of the same opinion. 
It requires that a man shall be in harmony with his 
environment; if his life does not contribute to the good 
of other lives he is out of tune. 

I will read you a letter now that gives out an 
approved program of life. It was written by a student 
to his father up on the old farm. "I have, I trust, 
now dedicated myself to God who formed me for his 
glory and I consider myself bound by every possible 
obligation to be active in his service as are those 
ministering spirits of his that excel in strength and 
do his pleasure. My business shall be to pass thro 
the world not merely with comfort, reputation and 
perhaps a degree of usefulness, but to attempt the 
greatest good, exert every faculty, go where he shall 
send me and most cheerfully execute all his commands." 

How invigorating is this ideal of life as against 
the one I overheard that day on the train. This was 
the young man who kept his promise of going 
wherever God should send him, by coming to St. 
Johnsbury in 1814 to teach district school, and by 
going in 1822 to teach the gospel in the capital of 
Turkey. William Goodell was his name. Fifty years 
he filled with the spirit of that letter, every year of 
the fifty flooded to the brim with resolute endeavor 
and bubbling good cheer. This is not an unheard of 
thing either, thousands like it are on the roll ; I light 
on this one because the letter happens to file itself into 
my present theme. 

86 



And what I want to ask is, if one such as he is not 
younger brother and fit companion to one who took 
an order once to fly swiftly with special despatches to 
Mesopotamia, and again delivered a message in Judea, 
saying, for certification, I am Gabriel? Verily, I think 
so, and so far as I can find, the one who didn't have 
wings did his part as well, enjoyed it quite as much as 
the one who did. In some points I should say even 
outranked the other, as for one thing, holding on to a 
hard discouraging work for forty years without any 
intermediate exhilarating trips to paradise till in 1867 
God called him up there. 

A man sometime ago surprised his audience by 
remarking that if the choice were given him he would 
be, not Gabriel but Brainerd, the missionary, who 
mended rail-fence, taught Susquehanna Indians, 
coughed out his life under a bear-skin on the cold 
ground. He meant, I suppose, that he would choose 
the total experience, the devotion and afterglow of one 
who had reached the crystal floor by the path of lowly 
service and hard testing of the mettle that was in him. 

This way of thinking is not after the manner of 
most men. It stops one in the way; it sends him 
plumb down into himself to enquire what he thinks 
about it. If he think honestly and seriously he will be 
saying presently ; yes, to serve God in any place that 
sorely needs our love and cheer and help is better than 
to float in light; to give one true heart and hand 
toward making this a brighter world is, for awhile at 
least, a better way of filling out the high symphony 
than to be amongst harpers harping with their harps. 

And we may as well go on to say of every one of 
God's sons or daughters who on earth do deny and 

87 



3ij? Wrnugljt Irim 

devote themselves, enduring as seeing him who is 
invisible, that even now they touch the heavenly 
strings of the symphony of God and more than 

" vie with Gabriel while he sings," 

Forasmuch as the soul that sticks lovingly to its 
task anywhere in this world of sin and shirking, is 
already in the high peerage of the principalities. Indeed 
I altogether believe it was after some such fashion of 
tested loyalty that they got their princedoms in the 
first place First, faithful over a few things, then ruler 
over ten cities. If that be true in one world, even a 
small one, it stands the same inviolable in all. 

The ruling ideas of the spiritual realm are identical 
at every point, in the earthly or any other province. 
What is earth but one of a family retinue attending the 
sun and his remoter sun — built as the spectrum 
announces of the identical stuff of sun and stars and 
cosmic nebulas — the self-same flaming hydrogen, or 
sodium and calcium, the same iron and copper and zinc 
thereabouts that we know and handle and fashion into 
tools. And what are the laws of stellar bodies but the 
same that wave their invisible sceptres everywhere 
around us, so that the pebble you toss across the way 
shall tally in its curve with the swing of earth around 
her sun and of the sun around his wider path. It is a 
universal symphony of obedience and precision that 
makes the music of the spheres, whatever that may be. 

Talk we of morals or of mathematics, it is all the 
same. Wherever we may alight a millennium from now 
we shall do our reckoning by the same arithmetic that 
we studied in the district school. No advanced science 
of upper worlds will ever make the square of the 

88 



A g>gmjrfjnttg 

hypothenuse other than equal to the sum of the squares 
of the other two sides. 

The right business way of doing things must be 
identical among all employees ou God's vast estates; 
fidelity is spelled the same way in our speech as with 
the alphabet of Oriel or Abdiel. 

With this difference to speak of, they excel in 
strength, we in weakness. But they in turn might 
answer — you have the Eternal Son born into your 
family, he is one of you, not of us. In him you can 
be stronger even than we, his humiliation and his 
coronation are for you, that makes your place in the 
family and your note in the song rank high. And 
besides, you are exactly fitted to your place. No other 
could ever do things there so well as you. 

How undeniably have some who walked the 
common ways of life here found that out and proved 
it true. In the weakness of their mortal frame they 
have kept spiritual step with those who stride among 
the firmaments of power; able to do all things and 
very surprising things, Christ working in them. 

Not only does the spirit of Christ in a man 
harmonize all discordant elements in himself, it also 
sets the entire note and content of his life to the great 
symphony of love and obedience. Loyalties of heart 
like strains of a sacred hymn belong to all ages, all 
worlds. They go right on forever to 

" Make one music as before 

But vaster." 

Group together all who have served God among men, 
and their varying lives give one main tone pitched to 
the keynote of Christ. If we could see them coming 

8 9 



m^t Wxmvfat Urtrn 

on a day to present themselves before the Lord, I 
think one interesting thing would be the harmonious 
mingling of all sorts and ranks of men. 

Kings of the earth, crowned or uncrowned, 
from Charlemagne to Washington and Lincoln — also 
undistinguished Smith and Jones. 

Judges of great fame, statesmen of the type of 
William of Orange and Gladstone — others good and 
faithful in their small way; the man with a hoe, the 
stoker who did not desert his engine at the crash, the 
woman whose hard work at the wash tub kept her 
little flock together. 

Some garlanded with laurel, Dante and Milton of 
epic tread, and Tennyson and Whittier and all 
daughters of sweet and sacred song — also some whose 
garlands were of plain sewing, of good housekeeping, 
of nursing the sick and caring for children. 

Artists who spread sacred themes on canvas, 
Leonardo, Angelo, Murillo, or who like Handel and 
Haydn rolled them into oratorios— artists of a different 
type much needed, who could turn duty into song, and 
light up their common days with cheerful color, making 
service a beautiful thing. 

A clear-eyed company sighting God's great 
thoughts among the stars, Kepler, Newton, Herschel — 
others who had eyes bent down to find fragments of 
God's image in the lower strata of man's perversity, 
poverty, misfortune, ignorance and heathenism. Say, 
princedoms, virtues, powers! what are these arrayed 
in plain dress, toilers in dark places for Christ's sake — 
what are these but angels of mercy indeed ? 

It is easy to see that such as these lived for 
something more than going to and fro and walking up 



go 



and down in the earth. Whatever their rank on 
society's blue-book or off it, they constitute the best 
there is or ever has been on this planet, 

" Earth's elite of every land, 
Men of speech and action grand," 

and queenly women entitled to carry Ithuriel's revealing 
spear or to wear the white lily of Gabriel. 

In tune with such as these I want the honor and 
the joy of one life part, and so do you; contributing 
every day some modest notes of our own to the great 
symphony. It is not so much where we are or what 
we do, as that we are in tune — so that God's will shall 
be done along the whole gamut of day's doings and 
wide world affairs. 

For not after one pattern nor in three ways nor 
four will God fulfil himself in us any more than 
aforetime. These days of construction call for builders 
and mechanics who like Noah will do according to all 
that God hath commanded. We want the spirit that 
went into the old carpenter's kit of Nazareth and into 
Dr. Luke's medicine chest. The business man may not, 
like Levi, leave his desk, but stick to it and make it 
one of the high places of the land. God used to find 
good workers on the farm or sheep pasture, why not 
now? If church and state are standing places for 
trained faculty and sanctified endeavor, so too are 
office, train, shop, field, and especially home and 
school which call for so many divinely feminine 
accomplishments all the way from making butter to 
exploring constellations. 

The one sweet and swelling harmony of earth — 
what is it, but this age-long doing of God's will by all 



9 1 



®Ij0 Urottgtft Wxm 

who do it. And this means not a few, but the hundred 
and forty and four thousand a thousand times and a 
million times multiplied, each one in fashion and 
ability as distinct as yours or mine, carrying one part 
toward rounding up the symphony of service. 

Also, as if to heighten the effect, mysterious powers 
of earth and air seem to come out from their hiding 
places and chime in with forceful parts. For even they 
are not mere cosmical arrangements, but blind agents 
on the spiritual field, ministers of truth and judgment 
and redeeming grace. If on a day they could present 
themselves among the sons of God with tongues to 
speak, what mighty acts might be rehearsed — by these 
his angels, the flying winds, and those fierce ministers 
of his, the flames of fire; by rains that streamed out a 
flood from opened windows and seven colors that wove 
their strands into a bow of covenant ; by darkness and 
hailstones and lightnings and cloudy pillar and stars 
fighting in their courses, yea sun and moon in their 
habitation hasting not to go down 

" At the light of thine arrows as they went 
At the shining of thy glittering spear." 

If cherubim and seraphim continually do cry, 

"Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth" 

an acted antiphon of service ascends from sun and 
stars, from dragons and all deeps, from clouds his 
chariot, and darkness his pavilion, and the firmament 
showing his handiwork, and from all his works in all 
places of his dominion. 

This is not fanciful, it is reality. All his works 
work together with his loyal sons to get his will done 
in earth as it is in heaven. 



9 2 



Therefore I am asking myself and you, good friends, 
what part are we carrying in the universal symphony ? 
what strain of intelligent, cheerful service to mingle 
with the music of the ages ? For my part and for my 
brethren and companions' sakes I will now say : 

Bless the Lord, my soul, 
Bless the Lord, house of Aaron, 
Bless the Lord, house of Levi. 

Bless the Lord, ye his angels that excel in strength, 

Ye ministers of his that do his pleasure- 
Kings of the earth, and all people, 
Princes and all judges of the earth, 

Both young men and maidens, 

Old men and children, 

Bless the Lord all his works, 
In all places of his dominion — 
Bless the Lord, my soul. 



93 



Kb £>nnhx 



White as Snow. 

Daniel, vii: 9. 

White as Snow. 

Mark, ix: 3. 

White as Snow. 

Revelations, i: 14. 

White as Snow. 

Isaiah, i: 18. 

Whiter than Snow. 

Psalm, li : 7. 
1890. 



Aa Bnahi 



^?jf% Y many repetitions in his word God associates 
jjljl that which is pure with snow. This we 
can readily understand for nothing is more 
delicately white and pure than snow just delivered 
from the sky. The fine lines of its myriad stars, the 
lightness of its downy fleece, the sparkle and sheen of 
its folds in the winter sunlight suggest better worlds 
than this. 

That was a question to set one thinking when the 
Lord enquired of Job if he had entered into the 
treasures of the snow. We are more apt to enter on 
some discussion of discomforts that come with it, than 
into any treasures that may be hid therein. We are 
thinking of cold weather, tedious winter, snow drifts ; 
and what comfortable times people are having in 
Florida. 

But every place and season has its compensations. 
There are some treasures to be had here in northeastern 
Vermont. No exuberance of the tropics could render a 
spectacle so nearly spiritual as that which met our 
eyes when -we woke this morning. Over the hills, thro 
evergreen boughs, on the tips of elm twigs, along the 
flat field from sky-line to the edge of the window frame 
it was heaven let down to earth. 



97 



Stye Jlniugift Urtm 

At the equator we might be seeing what it is for 
the righteous to flourish like a palm tree standing green 
and graceful on the dry desert. Not only is the scene 
and suggestion very different here, it is much more 
refined and celestial. A whiteness woven in the skies 
is silently dropped upon us and a voice from the sky 
bids us look for treasures in its folds. These for our 
present purpose will be some things set before our 
thought as white as snow. Five of them according to 
our five Bible sayings. 

First — there was the garment of the Ancient of 
Days which as Daniel saw it was white as snow. By 
this was indicated the purity, the holiness of God. 
Notice how much more is given in scripture than 
bare statement. It is written, God is holy. We never 
doubted that, but when thro the seer's vision we saw 
how the Ancient of Days did sit in his garment of snow 
on a throne of flame, the conception of holiness became 
picturesque. 

Looking out now on the wintry scene what is it 
that we see? Not common snow lying all around, not 
even fairy festoonings of the fir trees, but a robe fit for 
God to put on, to veil the fierceness of his splendor, to 
make purity sweet to our vision. 

Second—it is the raiment of a man that is seen to 
be white as snow. This man came one day up the 
mountain side. High in the background is the head of 
Her m on 

" Crowned long ago 
On a throne of rock 
With a diadem of snow." 

Here on the slope he is standing wistfully. At home he 
is known as the carpenter, also as a teacher and healer. 

98 



He is not taller than other men, nor differently built, 
nor more richly dressed. In fact his dress is very 
ordinary, a plain robe of dull color such as any average 
artisan would wear ; there's no pretense of priestly cut 
or fabric about it, nothing to give out that his soul is 
whiter than others. 

But lo, for once the reality asserts itself; the pure 
spirit that is within shines thro, illumines the face 
and even whitens the dull dress as no fuller on earth 
could, till it looks snow-white and glistering. Now 
against the background of snow that descended on the 
mountains of Hermon is this Son of man transfigured 
and entitled to appear in the robe of the Ancient of 
Days. 

Third — this same Jesus rises to view again, coming 
suddenly out this time from the unseen in splendor. 
He wears whiteness for a crown, his head and his hairs 
as white as snow. 

We may enter into some of the treasures of the 
snow thro the lens of a microscope, but it takes visions 
and transfigurations to open up its deeper suggestions. 
Snow is something more than a sample of crystals 
dropped from windows of the sky, it is more than 
fairy decoration for Christmas landscapes; snow is a 
revelation to the eye of the beauty of holiness. 

Fourth — we have now something different from 
visions, a straight matter of fact statement — tho your 
sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow. This 
is a surprising saying, if snow really means the same 
here as in the visions. Apparently it does, the pure 
white of soul. Now this is what none of us have, to 
begin with. Also it is precisely what we are appointed 
to arrive at finally. This is the divine program, the 

99 
[LofC. 



gospel of God, to bring a sinful heart up to snow 
standard. 

Wilful disobedience of God is painted the color of 
scarlet, a bad color scripturally — note the great red 
dragon, and the bad woman, mother of abominations, 
who flaunts a scarlet gown and sits on a scarlet 
colored beast. How different this from the pure sweet 
white of snow. Did you ever come suddenly upon 
blood-stains on the snow ? that was no canny sight to 
look at. Sin is scarlet seen as God sees against the 
snow white of his holiness, unbearably offensive ; also 
double-dyed as the word means, deep in and fast color. 
But saith the Lord, let us reason together — tho your 
soul be as scarlet, if you turn to me and be willing and 
obedient you shall be white as snow. It would be hard 
for us to believe that, if we did not know that God 
always means precisely what he says. 

Fifth— we have the same great truth taken up but 
at the other end of the line. This time it is a man who 
speaks, in the shame of his bloodguiltiness. So bad is 
his case he can do nothing with it. He puts himself at 
once and as he is, in God's hand without any doubt as 
to what he needs and what will be done for him — 

" Create in me a clean heart, O God, 
Renew a right spirit within me. 
Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow." 

He knew it was no use to try to wash out himself. We 
will thank him for writing down just how he felt, and 
for giving us the very words of his prayer, for we all 
need to learn it and to pray it. Some may be cleaner 
than others, but what does that signify. I thought 
that house was white till the snow fell, then it didn't 



ioo 



Ah g>nnto 

look so white, and besides how ugly the stains all at 
once became. Our goodness does not look so good 
when we see it by the side of one life that never knew 
an evil thought. 

A few pages front of this sinner's prayer we find an 
upright man who fears God and eschews evil ; he is all 
right so far, till he gets a sense of God as holy — then he 
thinks if he should wash himself in snow-water and 
become never so clean that way it would be as if he 
were still in the ditch. Upright Job and faithless David 
alike need cleansing by the same Spirit, so do I, so do 
you. 

Rain enough in the sweet heavens to wash this 
little hand ? No, Lady Macbeth, not enough, nor 
virtue enough in it either. It needs more than rain or 
snow-water, more than baths and immersions ; the 
trouble is spiritual, so must the remedy be, "except a 
man be born of water and of the Spirit he cannot enter 
into the Kingdom of God." 

We are to see that sin is scarlet, deep-dyed but not 
ineradicable. Its curse is on every man and on man's 
affairs. Yes even on the ground for man's sake. But 
what is this that we see ? 

Over the ground that seemed hard and dark as if a 
curse were on it, God, while we slept, folded the best 
robe heaven's looms could weave, and now looking 
thro the crisp morning air it is like another earth. 
Every ugly thing is out of sight, rough angles are 
rounded into curves, roofs and fences fringed with 
feather-work, the clumsiest cart is a celestial chariot 
and the refuse heap a dome of beauty. It is a pure 
sweet world we look upon, clean and white as snow. 

And what we are to see in all this is something 



IOI 



Sty? Hmugtjt Irun 

more than a wintry snowscape ; it is a vision to certify 
to us that after the dark night of sin is over we shall 
see a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. And 
any day or night meantime on the way toward it,when 
the wayward son returns to the Father — off with that 
scarlet! bring forth the best robe, the white one, and 
put it on him ! for this my son was lost and is found. 

We must, however, note the fact that no absolute 
nor continuous whiteness can be expected here. The 
earthly state does not admit of any one supremely 
perfect thing of man. There is endless antagonism 
between the earthly and heavenly. At the early 
snow-fall it is a question whether we are to have clean 
snow right along or abundance of disagreeable slush. 
At any rate the white is soon soiled, its purity outraged 
by offensive things of all sorts. Only new supplies, as 
of grace, sent down from above every day can keep the 
snow surface clean. Even then its time is short, this 
earth is no good place for so etherial a thing as the 
snow-flake. It must come to humiliation here, its airy 
tabernacle be taken down, its whiteness seem to perish 
as it dies into muddy water, lost apparently forever. 

Is that so ? Not at all. Like the soul whose story 
it is now figuring to our thought, it simply lays one 
body aside and takes another. It rises from death in 
the vapor-wreath, its spiritual body, and is caught up 
into the air. Bosomed in the fleece of the cloud it floats 
in light. 

We become aware as we go along in life of some 
surprising things. Here is one. God is not only 
tolerating this world, he is getting out of it material 
for beautifying heaven. It would seem incredible that 
men as low down as many are in this earth, could ever 



102 



As g>tuita 

be made fit for a pure world. Yet that is precisely 
what is being done. Albeit nothing short of a divine 
and spiritual alchemy could effect it. Even in the slums 
of sin one is not beyond reach of transfiguring grace if 
his face be set stedfastly upward toward God. 

Look some day as you are passing by, at any dirty 
stagnant pool of water, a wayside puddle or swamp 
or even cesspool. There is a thing offensive to sight 
and smell, unfit to touch, polluted with fever-germs, 
stained it may be with blood, a spectacle to get away 
from as fast as you can. 

There it is, the hateful thing with its bad odour 
and slime. But so long as its face is upward toward 
the sun some silent energy from heaven will come down 
and work therein. Already its face begins to reflect the 
pure blue of the sky. Presently the subtile working 
of sky-powers begins to gradually draw it upward, 
away from the foul marge. Mysteriously, silently 
it is evaporated, caught up into the bosom of the 
white cloud. And some cool day, drawn up thro 
God's air-filters and refrigerators it is wonderfully 
transfigured into flying six-rayed crystals that go 
careering above the firmament and playing thro the 
sapphire blue. It is the new birth of the snow, born 
anew from a mud-puddle. 

Now I have read from an old letter, of some men 
who by the names given them must have been about as 
bad as men could be — idolaters, adulterers, effeminate, 
abusers, thieves, covetous, drunkards, extortioners, 
revilers. This perhaps was not surprising, but now 
comes a thing that is, for says the writer — such were 
some of you, but ye are washed, justified, sanctified in 
the name of the Lord Jesus, by the Spirit of our God. 

103 



Born anew out of the cesspools of Corinth, that wicked 
city, as also even out of Sardis, and afterward taken 
up to walk in white which is the righteousness of the 
saints. 

Very surprising as we think of it is this replenishing 
of heaven with what was once the scum of earth. We 
uncover our heads and adore the grace that works 
that way. We are not forgetting either that the 
very same transforming touch is needed for the finest 
respectabilities of man's life. There has never been 
but One in our human family whose heart could bear 
the searchlight of God's holiness. It needs his spirit 
renewing ours to bring the whiteness that is imaged in 
the mirror let down from heaven white as snow. 

This whiteness of the snow is a thing apart, there's 
none like it. Other things are white but the white 
of snow is peerless — a selected white for the veil of 
the Ancient of Days. Now the secret of this snow 
whiteness lies in the structure God has appointed for 
it. It results from the play of light over multitudinous 
little mirrors sharply cut and set in all sorts of ways 
at every possible angle of incidence and reflection. 
Each flake is an aggregation of prisms each one of 
which catches the sunlight on a different slope from 
the rest, and as the rays fly flashing to and fro 
amongst the myriads of polished surfaces there is 
woven for us the white that is white as snow, 
a whiteness refined and delicate, as it were sifted out 
from the great white throne. 

But now another remarkable circumstance. 
However many these myriads of snow crystals of all 
manner of outline, they all alike conform themselves 
at the center to one unvarying figure, namely the 

104 



Ab fttoto 

six-rayed star. Every flake that ever came down, 
first had stamped on it this divine pattern of the 
hexagon, 

" Six rays are set upon the star of snow, 
If these their constant order could forego 
Sun, moon and stars would break their sacred plight." 

On this foundation of the sixes then, God has set 
the innumerable company of shapes bearing feathers, 
fronds, banners, spear-points, needles, disks, crescents, 
crosses, scrolls, fringes, flowers, ferns, ten thousand 
times ten thousand variations, but every one conformed 
to the pattern given in the mount. 

You will see what this means to my thought just 
now. We may conclude that a soul is at least 
becoming white like snow when it catches the pattern 
and reflects the likeness of our Saviour. It was this 
that made fellowship possible between the converted 
rakes of Corinth and men of the style of Paul and 
Sosthenes. On this foundation of likeness to the 
pattern given, any man whosoever he be can be 
at home in the family of God. There are in this 
world today people of all varying shades, ranks, 
temperaments, gifts, peculiarities, experience, who 
differing much in many ways are at the center 
conformed to the pattern and living Christlike lives. 

And report has reached us from another world of 
a great multitude whom no man can number of every 
nation, kindred, tongue and people, who have this same 
defining mark as a seal on their hearts and a name in 
their foreheads. When I think of these multitudinous 
hosts mingling in one atmosphere of love, reflecting 
the Redeemer's likeness as from myriads of polished 

105 



mirrors at innumerable angles of peculiarity and 
experience and activity, it seems to me the effect must 
be radiantly beautiful like the peerless white of the 
snow. May we find our place and part therein in the 
great day. 

Just now and for awhile longer this world of sin 
has more need of our Christian presence than heaven 
has. Here is where our Lord in love and pain wrought 
out the pattern, here he wants us to show men what 
it is in every day living. 

Our first care shall be to give ourselves to the 
imprint of his Spirit. That mark on each disciple is 
determinative as the six-ray mark on the snow star. 
One star differeth from another star in all manner of 
diversity. Every star in God's spiritual firmament will 
be a unique variation on one incomparable pattern, 
Jesus Christ the bright and morning Star. 

That new-birth mark will show itself somehow on 
the life of every true disciple. His affiliations are not 
with mire but with stars. His place is in the train of 
the Ancient of Days whose robe is white as snow. 



106 



Styanks for % ©rbtttarg 

And it shall be, that thou shall drink of the brook ; and I have 
commanded the rave?is to feed thee there. 

I. Kings, xvii: 4. 
1900. 



QfyaukB fat % ©rbmarg 



^4 AM in the mood for some talk about the ordinary, 
^1 Just now at the end of the century it is mostly 
and very fittingly the extraordinary that is 
fetched into view. The splendid and alluring panorama 
of a hundred years passes before us. We view with 
admiring wonder the unfolding of thought, invention, 
discovery, adjustment, mastery, that has put a new 
face on the world and given bounding impulse to man's 
endeavor. 

Not for a moment do I forget that all this is grand 
in reality and big with promise for the future. It is 
inspiring, exhilirating, a challenge to every man to 
set his life with seriousness and cheer to the forward 
march of the world. Ten thousand handy, fine, 
ingenious products of modern mind are not one too 
many if they can be surely made to serve the best 
ideals of life. There is no reason for wanting to get 
back from railway and telephone to stage coach days ; 
we haven't any use for the old fashioned surgery; 
nobody is going to be exalted into a more worshipful 
mood by reinstalling a set of smoky whale oil lamps 



in 



SIfje Uraugljt Irtrn 

in place of the electric illumination that floods God's 
house this hour with something of the light of his 
throne. 

But how to use the new facilities and refinements 
without getting fastidious and luxurious, or losing 
relish for plain, substantial things is quite a real 
puzzle. Aboriginal simplicities still continue to give 
their charm to childhood, but it isn't long before they 
evaporate in the rarified atmosphere of the times. It 
takes a good deal to keep up the interest of life. 
Discontent with the ordinary is not far from becoming 
a contagious disease. 

Look out anywhere and see how it is — fashions go 
at so rapid a rate that only the smart set can keep up 
with them; each novelty of dress, art, books, foods, 
play, or whatever else, whets an appetite for fresher 
novelties; community is craning its neck after the 
next new thing; people want to be immensely 
amused; public speakers must be so uncommon as to 
draw; newspapers must have graphic scenery; the 
entertainment is nothing if not spiced with original or 
startling attractions ; it needs no longer crops, cattle, 
pigs and poultry, but balloons and vaudeville to make 
an agricultural fair. The fever is on for what is off the 
ordinary and out of the plain. That's one reason why I 
like to get back once in a while to what is simple, plain 
and old-fashioned, and to stir up some clear note of 
thanks for the ordinary. 

Considerable virtue is still to be found in some 
things that have been from the foundation of the 
world ; things to use or to admire and thank God for— 
such as air, sky, sunlight, stars, rain and dew, ground, 
grass, trees, flowers, rivers, birds, creatures wild 



112 



ofyanka for ilje ©rftmarg 

or tame, quiet homes, books, people, daily work, 
something to eat and drink. 

And it shall be, said God once to a man, it shall be 
thou shalt drink of the brook and I have commanded 
the ravens to feed thee there. Did any of us, I wonder, 
ever pity the man that he had to go out there in the 
wilderness with only a brook and some wild ravens for 
company ? I think not. More likely we've thought 
such an outing for a while would be quite interesting. 
In fact, some of us have tried it, camping out in the 
woods, living a wild life, chatting with chipmunks, 
birds and frogs and crickets, relishing our plain fare 
and ground beds, having a real enjoyable visit with 
old mother Nature. Here was the brook, as of old? 
curving, chattering, babbling, bubbling, going on 
forever. At home we sipped our tea from cups of 
porcelain, delicate, shapely, hand-painted, choice 
treasures of the china closet. Out here a dented tin 
cup, maybe, but cup or no cup, here's the brook itself, 
the overflow of a brimming cup God placed high up the 
mountain side — and it shall be thou shalt drink of the 
brook and listen to the lulling music of its flow and lie 
on the ground looking into the trees and wondering 
why people must have so many things piled up around 
them. 

It's astonishing, said the editor of the Ladies' 
Home Journal last week, how much we can do 
without, and be a thousand times the better for it. 
This is not exactly a monastic journal either. Once in 
a year, however, we do allow ourselves a sense of 
fullness ; on Thanksgiving day we sit at tables spread 
with white linen, adorned with silver, glass, 
decorated ware; the roasted turkey is flanked with 

**3 



®fp> Unmgljt Brim 

parsley, cranberries, celery, squash, potatoes, cabbage, 
beets, turnips, onions, jellies, pickles, pies of divers 
sorts and puddings skillfully compounded, nuts, fruits, 
candies, chocolates, coffees, sherbets and ice creams, 
till in its physical frame poor human nature can stand 
no more. All this in a way befits the occasion, as an 
expression spread out to the eye of the superabundance 
of our Heavenly Father's gifts to his children. 

But the man who got only what some wild birds in 
their foraging flight dropped within his reach, even he 
had something for sound thoughts and thanks. He had 
enough to supply his need which was more than some 
have; he had a sure sense of God's providing hand in 
it, which many of us fail to recognize. With him it 
was plain living and high thinking ; frugal fare, but in 
it was the making of an athlete who could run a foot 
race front of the galloping horses of the king twenty- 
seven miles on a stretch from Carmel to the Jezreel 
gate. 

There's something to be learned and not a little to 
be thankful for at the point where life is reduced to its 
lowest denominator. About all our New England 
fathers had or asked for, was a patch of ground to 
cultivate, a place for a log hut and a meeting house. 
I was thinking just now of the patch of ground as 
about the lowest level of the ordinary — too ordinary 
for notice except that it is dusty in a dry time, dirty 
and sticky in the wet. But if we get our sentiment of 
thanks down to the roots of things, that you see 
brings us to the ground floor. This homely stuff that 
we think of as common dirt is real estate, the 
foundation stuff that furnishes all our Thanksgiving 
dinners, our flowers and fruits, our porcelain cups, 

114 



utfjankis tat iift ©rbtnarg 

material for the garments we put on, lumber for the 
houses we live in. There's healing and disinfecting 
virtue in it; the smell of its upturned turf is 
wholesome, a better carpet for children than three-ply 
or Brussels; into its dark bosom it takes all sorts of 
noxious things and turns their filth or poison into food 
for flowers. Shall I shake off the dust of mj feet 
for a testimony against it? No, I shall magnify its 
homeliness in verse that is fittingly homely. 

"My back-yard garden looks inert, 
There may be places brighter ; 
But still its strong dynamic dirt 
Is po werful as nitre. 

The long result of cosmic toil 

Thro nature's patient stages, 
Has concentrated in its soil 

The potency of ages. 

The lime from some old saurian's bones 

Now feeds the young tomatoes ; 
The dust of old volcanic stones 

Makes rich the new potatoes. 

To light this ground with blossom smiles, 

To make the beans grow higher, 
The sun thro ninety million miles 

Sends down his shafts of fire." 

One bean on the way to the bean-pot begins to 
be interesting when I consider that heaven and earth 
and starry space and cosmic force and all uncounted 
ages have gone into the making of that same bean. 
Perhaps this is why the bean is much accounted of 
in the metropolis of New England ? 

Speaking of foods, also, what is it that everywhere 
and always has gotten to itself the designation of staff 
of life? Plain bread. This is good and thankworthy. 

**5 



Stye Urnugfji Irtm 

This is the principal thing. No mention shall be made 
of perpetual pie. Thanksgiving every day of the year is 
for the simpler furnishments of the table. I know a 
New England town where for many years they lived on 
corn and bean porridge and potatoes and barley broth, 
and were sturdy and clear-headed and contented and 
thrifty, and very thankful. No need of soda mints nor 
dyspeptic tablets. Most of us would put up with a 
little more variety, but we never shall outgrow the 
demand for a good light loaf of bread, or any like sort 
of plain and wholesome food, skill in the compounding 
of which, I have said, and say again, is in the front rank 
of feminine accomplishments. 

Shortly before Mrs. Garfield was, with her husband 
called to the White House, she wrote him during his 
absence: "It came to me this morning while I was 
making bread — why not consider this a very pleasant 
occupation and make it so by making perfect bread. 
After that the very sunshine seemed flowing down 
thro my spirit into the loaves, and now my table has 
better bread than ever before; the truth, old as 
creation, is becoming fully mine, that I need not be 
the slave of toil, but its regal master. You have been 
king of your work so long that maybe you will laugh 
at me, but I shall not be disconcerted even by your 
merriment." Garfield's merriment, if any, was, I'm 
sure, of a thankful sort ; good bread, good sense, good 
humor, good living; of a truth these are good and 
thankworthy. A few picked men like Garfield will be 
kings of their work up at the front, and perhaps be 
shot for it ; but ten thousand home-keeping women 
and men may have a song of thanksgiving for sunshine 
flowing thro their thoughts upon their everyday tasks. 

116 



©Ijattkjs far tlje ©rfcutarg 

Or if sunshine won't shine you'll be thankful for the 
challenge to something that must be done whether you 
like it or not. 

Thank God every morning when you get up, said 
Charles Kingsley, that you are forced to do something 
and to do your very best, for that will breed in you 
self-control, diligence, content, strength of will and a 
hundred virtues. 

" Do the work that's nearest, tho it's dull at whiles ; 
Helping when you meet them, lame dogs over stiles." 

We had better include in our thanksgiving list the 
satisfactions we've gotten from opportunities for 
helping people, from skill in accomplishing something 
— as getting a hard lesson, doing a first-rate job of 
joiner work or machinery, fitting over an old garment 
to be as good as new almost; balancing intricate 
accounts, keeping things up in the house; doing the 
plain things that make up four-fifths of life, and doing 
them as if we were trained artists. 

And indeed it takes more of an artist maybe to do 
a thing or make a thing than we thought. Here's this 
one-wheeled affair that I use for trundling dirt around 
in ; it is so handy I feel like taking off my hat to the 
inventor of it. And so, off goes my hat to Leonardo 
da Vinci, for the same hand that painted The Last 
Supper made the first wheelbarrow, so I have read. 
And that homely little cart is likely to keep right on 
trundling along till the end of time, facilitating the 
doing of chores around the yard and garden. 

We're finding that star-eyed science belongs to 
common life ; not only interpreting laws of planets and 
of nations, but dictating the shape of farming tools, 

117 



Sty* Urnugijt Irtm 

and the mixing of dough in the pantry. The clumsiest 
farmer in the land plows his field in smooth furrows 
because Thomas Jefferson found out the exact relation 
between the cutting wedge and the lifting wedge. If it 
required brains to draft the Declaration of Independence 
it took some of the same to draw the model of a plow. 
It is interesting to think of great nation-builders like 
Jefferson and Washington bestowing close thought 
on common affairs, getting so much enjoyment on 
their farms, improving plows, cosseting sheep and 
cattle, and breaking colts. 

Along levels that anybody can reach lies the bulk 
of happiness everywhere. Thanksgiving, as all know 
very well, may be a brighter day in the farmer's 
unpainted kitchen or the modest village cottage than 
in a million dollar house. Its infancy indeed was in 
the log cabin and happily it hasn't yet outgrown its 
adaptability to anybody anywhere. As much was 
gotten out of the old time blind man's buff or who's 
got the button, as out of any paraphernalia for games 
ever invented. What more did any youngster need 
in times within my remembrance than a chance in 
the pasture after berries or butternuts, a box trap 
for catching relays of squirrels for his cage, an old 
barrel stave with hammer and some eight-penny 
nails for constructing a skooter — except perhaps the 
incomparable luxury of a pair of skates. At the south 
end of the ground covered by this church and 
Academy, I have seen girls who are grave matrons 
now, chasing each other gleefully at the primitive game 
of tag and doubtless they would like to do it again. At 
the north end unsuspected candidates for the bench and 
pulpit were having their leap frog and three-year-old- 

ii8 



SJfattkfi far ftp ©r&fnarg 

cat with as much relish as if they were a team of today 
on the way to university honors. 

I was interested in this that was told me about a 
piece of string. There was a toy chariot displayed 
among Christmas goods. It went by springs, 
when it started the driver cracked his whip and the 
four folks inside twisted their necks to see what was 
going on. A boy was sure that if he could have that 
chariot he would be supremely happy, and never need 
anything else as long as he lived. When the time came 
for Santa Claus to be haunting the chimney flue, a 
mysterious parcel was delivered for this boy. Off went 
the long, stout string that tied it together and out 
came the coveted chariot. A wise mother picked up 
the string and put it in the work basket. Some weeks 
after, the proprietor of the vehicle was asking for 
something to play with. "Why, where's your chariot ?" 
"0, that old thing is no good! it's got out of fix, and 
I'm tired of it anyway!" That evening the string was 
fished out from the work basket. A skillful mother's 
hand taught the young chariot-man plenty of 
interesting performances with that string; cat's cradle, 
triangles, squares, parallelograms, various sorts of 
knots and puzzles and games, insomuch that the best 
fun of that winter's evenings was had with this cast- 
off piece of pack-thread. Most important of all was 
the discovery that an old string might provide more 
enjoyment than a gilded chariot with prancing horses. 

Now r I submit it to your own experience if, early or 
late, you have not found this to be a true story, one to 
be thankful for. In the distribution of the world's 
prizes, like those of Santa Claus, it is not everyone 
that can have a chariot or even a one-horse team; 



n 9 



but everybody may find satisfactions good and 
thankworthy in the pack-thread elements of life — in 
the endless string of duties, homely but interesting 
because of the chance they give for doing things 
as they ought to be done — in the cord of mutual 
dependence that binds all the wide world's industries 
into one — in the multitudinous threads of personal 
interest that turn the largest part of the day's work 
into ministries of affection. 

We need to keep ourselves in continuous training 
towards appreciative moods. To a person who was 
likely to feel exiled out on the farm, Horace Bushnell 
wrote, "the very poverty of your sights and conditions 
will yield up something interesting if you insist on it ; 
look at the pigs' tails spiraling in the curve always one 
way ; one more evidence of the uniformity of law, or if 
they have been cut off, note how the lines of beauty 
once gone can never be restored." This delicious bit of 
appreciation was written some while before the 
popular wave of nature study had set in, tho even 
then we had heard one say as he went along peering 
into things : 

" Let me go where'er I will 
I hear a sky-born music still ; 
It is not only in the bird, 
Nor in the song of woman heard, 
But in the darkest, meanest things 
There alway, alway something sings." 

This of course presupposes the hearing ear, mindful 
to find music in the mud and scum of things, and 
occasion for thanks in the ordinary. I wonder if any 
of you noticed in one of our periodicals recently this 
remark, made, said the writer, by a sweet woman of 



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Sfyanka for tip ©r&Utarg 

many sorrows: "Every night when I say my prayers 
I thank my Heavenly Father that I can read books, 
and that I have a sense of humor." 

And did that moreover, prompt you on the spot to 
thank God for any two ordinary things on your part ; 
as that you can see the face of the friend you're talking 
with, or that you can snuff the fragrance of a rose ; 
that you can hear bird songs old as the world and 
sweet as Eden, or the home-sounding crow of the 
rooster ; that you hear the merry laugh of the children, 
the call of Sabbath bells and the strains of some 
plaintive Balerma or Naomi waking in your soul holy 
memories of long ago ? Most of these everyday things 
that contribute to the scenery and variety of life have 
been worn down into such commonness that unless an 
accident shuts them off a while, we hardly think of 
them at all. 

It is only as we lay hold of our thought and bend 
it down to consider and be thankful, that we get any 
conception of the kind and homely offices performed for 
us by such modest little contrivances as a drum in the 
ear, a nerve point in the nose, a small round doorway 
in the eye; also a thinking apparatus that does 
not wear out, nor veer off its delicate pivots, 
notwithstanding it is worked so hard, charged with 
so many responsibilities year after year, but on the 
whole increases in power and mastery. Bless the Lord 
my soul, for level head and sound mind. 

Now I will set it down as one indication of sane 
and level mind in us today that we take account of the 
ordinary, and do not let ourselves be run away with 
by the smartness of the times we live in. Admitting 
that physical powers have been multiplied by an 

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Wqt Unmglft Irutt 

unknown quantity, it is fair to ask, as Dr. Van Dyke 
did a while ago, whether or not moral powers have 
had their square root extracted. As we look out, the 
achievements of the century tower and glitter before 
us with a fascination to which we promptly yield, 
whether we've been to the great expositions or not. 
Always in all this there's a main question to raise, viz: 
is the world as much better relatively as it is brighter ? 
Life is swifter, brighter, easier. Is it by that much 
sweeter and purer? Does wisdom keep pace with 
wealth? Men are smart in business, in politics. Are 
they so much the more sincere in private life and in the 
great corporation? The new is extraordinary. Does 
that mean that we're now done with the ordinary, the 
simple, the plain, the old-fashioned ? 

A moment's thought will show us that back of all 
the new that quickens the pace of living, are the plain 
features that never change, the simplicities that always 
have given comfort and sweetness and dignity and 
power to life, and always will. When we get at real 
life we find it just the same in this vivid, electric age 
that it always "was — as the lightnings that Franklin 
coaxed down on his kite string— another interesting 
old string — are the same lightnings that played around 
the bald head of Sinai. 

If you want a good garden in your life you have 
the same formula Adam had — dress it and keep it and 
let alone what's forbidden. Some very substantial 
things hold over from century to century. Time 
cannot make all ancient good uncouth. There will 
always be a grain market. Plain living will continue 
to be the best. Simple things still have their charm. 
The old stiff-backed chairs are back again already. 



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SJfankB for % ©rJnutarg 

No new century novelties in music will ever steal away 
the spells from Auld Lang Syne, The Old Arm Chair, 
The Swanee River, Home Sweet Home. The brook 
will run along its curving, babbling way and it shall 
be that thou shalt loiter there and play with its 
bubbles and rest in the rippling music of its flow. 

New things will be good, but not good enough 
to order out the old. Art will be running out after 
varying styles of expression, but the Greek line will 
remain; the humble cottage will continue picturesque 
on canvass; the richest drawing-room will find place 
for a picture of two toil-worn potato diggers at the 
ringing of the Angelus. The family cat will continue 
to contribute an air of comfort to the hearth or easy 
chair. Books that have moved the heart once will do 
it again. The new literature will not discover any 
blazoned cathedral glass that shall render more to the 
world's dutiful home life than a modest twelve-inch 
window in Thrums where the patient mother sits 
looking out from her dreary surroundings. " The Lord 
has gi'en this hoose ane sae mony blessin's 'at to pray 
for mair looks like no bien thankfu' for what we've 
got." 

"Plowmen, shepherds, have I found, 

And more than once, and still shall find, 
Sons of God and kings of men 
In utter nobleness of mind." 

Thank God for nobility in the ordinary. The best 
types of twentieth century life will for the most part 
rise from the ordinary level as always before. They 
will not invariably take first-class passage, but they 
will perpetuate the qualities that have led the progress 
of the world. The Atlantic greyhounds with intellect, 



™3 



Slip Wttm&ft Brim 

culture, wealth and power gracing their splendid 
saloons, will bring across the sea no manhood more 
stalwart, no womanhood more enduring and brave, 
than was packed into the stuffy cabin of the 
Mayflower. 

Thank God once for the new science that is making 
a new earth, once for inventions that brighten and ease 
man's life — thank God three times over for the spirit of 
the Pilgrims, for conscience, reverence for law, for 
loyalty to God, for the homely art of sticking to duty. 
Thank God for these old-fashioned ideas that are 
making present day heroism every hour of the twenty- 
our. Thank God for the engineer at his perilous post ; 
the hospital nurse amongst loathsome diseases; the 
house mother singing tho bound in poverty and toil; 
the hard working farmer and miner getting food and 
fuel for everybody; the missionary, disinterested and 
consecrated, not abandoning her little flock till the red 
knife of fanaticism is driven into her heart. 

I will be thankful for every new application of 
truths old as the world, ordinary as the coat I put on. 
The pole star is still a safe guide. The twenty-third 
Psalm still lights a dark way. Bible scenery may be 
old and homely, but it is clear-cut to view and to 
everyday experience, as the sharpest picture of the new 
calcium light. Men are still walking with God, or 
wrestling with their nobler impulse in some defile of 
Jabbok till break of day. Maidens accompany the 
bride to the wedding as they did the gracious and 
beautiful Abigail. Young men smite their lion or bear 
and even go for the big Philistine that defies the God of 
hosts. The Rechabite family is not extinct by any 
means in Vermont, nor the kindly ministries that 



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SJjanltfi for iift ©rhutarg 

replenish the widow's meal. There's still virtue in 
Isaiah's poultice for a boil. And the old hen is 
anxiously clucking for her chickens, as when the 
Saviour saw her in Galilee. The busy housewife is not 
yet done sweeping the floors or stirring in the yeast, 
and, happily, the prodigal beginning to be in want, 
feels the same old impulse stirring in his heart to say, 
I will arise and go unto my father. 

The old truths are not outworn nor outgrown, not 
even is the nap worn off. Places hallowed by simple 
stories of old are right around us like the hills we look 
on every day, "and faith has still its Olivet and love 
its Galilee." The foremost man of the twentieth 
century will need the same Saviour that the leper came 
to long ago. Abram did not hold the telephone to his 
ear at Mamre; all the same he got messages across 
the wireless sky that you and I will want to hear with 
the dawning century. Thank God for new heavens 
and the new earth! Thank God with warmer thanks 
for the old, old story; for the homely manger and the 
carpenter's shop; for the plain ways our Saviour 
trod ; for his example of the dignity and power of life 
in the ordinary, 

"For the common deeds of the common day 
Are ringing bells in the far away." 



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®h*0 HagnttB, Jour ten 



Two wagons and four oxen he gave unto the sons of Gershon, 
according to their service. 

And Jour wagons and eight oxen he gave unto the sons of 
Merari, according unto their service. 

But unto the sons of Kohath he gave none. 

Numbers, vii : 7-9. 
1884 



®hm Hagotts, 3faur (§xm 



^JTHOSE wagons were not for speed nor for beauty. 
IJL They were low wooden carts mounted on -wheels 
hewn from a thick plank. But like some other 
old fashioned things they are interesting. A quaint 
dignity seems to invest them, as leaders of a long 
procession of vehicles used in the service of religion. 
They were a part of the religious establishment 
organized at Sinai, forerunners, we might say, of the 
modern gospel wagon and missionary ships. 

Supplementary to materials given for the construc- 
tion and furnishments of the tabernacle, came a call 
for transportation service. So one man subscribed an 
ox, another a wagon, others did the same till twelve 
oxen and six wagons had been offered. These were 
then detailed to the Levite families of Gershon and 
Merari. It was their business when the tabernacle 
was taken down, to load it on to these carts and drive 
the oxen along. 

As I look at it, the slow creeping of those ox 
teams across the desert is something more than merely 
getting from one place to another. It is the onward 
movement of the institutions of religion. I will set a 

I2 9 



Sty? Mrnugtft Irtm 

few stakes down by the way, marking points to be 
noted. 

First — Two wagons, four oxen. This means a 
move. No sooner are they well settled here at Sinai 
than wagons are brought up, for they must go. Not 
even here at the mount of God can they stay any long 
while. Out yonder is a bigger world, a larger plan of 
life, and now the teams are ready to start. 

Stagnation must be broken up whether by an ox 
cart or an express train. The very life of life is to keep 
stirring. There are little trips to be made every day 
for the many things that must be done. We have to 
go out beyond ourselves into the larger life of other 
people. Wheels mean progress, even for those who 
are shut in. They bring daily mail and traffic to us 
and require that we in our little corner of the world 
keep abreast of all advancing thought and generous 
endeavor. 

Wheels show progress. The uncouth cart of 
Midian should be seen alongside the spider-web wheels 
of the bicycle or the drivers of the hundred and fifty 
ton locomotive. What would this make us think of? 
Not simply rapid transit, but the forward push of 
man's intelligence. Front of every wheel on the road 
or in the factory is the mind that demanded it, created 
it, adjusted it and made it go. Not only do wheels in 
their turning get us over the ground, they show us the 
energetic ongoings of man's mind, the progress of the 
world. But now another matter comes to the front — 
a very essential one as reported by those desert carts. 

Second — Two wagons, four oxen. This means 
more than a move, it signifies that when the people go, 
the tabernacle must go too. The progress of the world 



ISO 



®hm Wagons, Jfaur (§xm 

includes and depends on the institutions of religion. 
Some seem never to have thought of this. 

Just at the time that Libni, the Gershonite, is 
getting his oxen into position west of the tabernacle 
court, I can see how Kenaz brother-in-law of Jethro 
might be coming along. He is an old Sheikh of Mid ian, 
he knows the desert well, how to live in it and how to 
go thro it. Leaning on his lance while they are loading 
up the wagons, he breaks out with a deliverance of his 
opinion — what fools, Beni-Yisrael, to load yourselves 
with all this useless stuff! in the desert it needs only 
the roof of the sky to make a sacred place, and why 
lug around that great brazen altar when at every 
camping ye shall find stones to build altars withal ! 

And reasoning as men do, the Sheikh to the desert 
born, is quite right. Over those plains, or any where 
else in fact, one wants to carry as little as possible. 
Luggage was long ago correctly called impedimenta. 
Loyalty to your religion does not require you to carry 
the big family Bible on a journey; you will take a 
testament and some few needful things only that will 
pack snugly in small compass. But these Iraelites are 
loading themselves with a costly and burdensome 
structure requiring for transportation six wagons and 
twelve oxen. 

This, the old Sheikh thinks is a queer way; but 
there is one item in the case which he does not take 
into account. These Beni-Yisrael are not down here 
in the desert by any arrangement of theirs, nor are 
they planning to make any move by advice of their 
neighbors. The God who strangely got them down 
here, ordered this tabernacle built before he would lead 
them one step up toward the land he sware unto their 

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-\ 



®{p> 3fflr0itgljt Irtm 

fathers. And over every inch of the long way he 
requires them to carry all its parts and belongings, 
from the heavy brass altar to the little pins and 
snuff-dishes. Only by loading themselves with all this 
will they ever get where they want to be. When the 
Sheikh of Midian understands this, the whole thing 
will look differently to him. 

How is it with us today. Here we are in the midst 
of the journey of our life. Not by any plan of ours did 
we start on this trip, nor do we have the management 
of it ourselves, nor can we guess the right way out 
except as we carry along with us the illuminations and 
ordinances of religion. It needs these to make a right 
way for ourselves and for our little ones and for the 
progress of the world. 

A nimble man of affairs comes along and he says, 
why so much religious observance? Why so much 
money put into church buildings and their running 
gear ? One can make a living in this world and come 
out all right without taking on all these burdens and 
formalities. 

Can he, indeed? He does not know what he is 
talking about. It isn't a mere matter of making a 
living or of getting thro somehow. It is the great 
question of the meaning of life — the dignity of it, the 
discipline of it, the destiny of it. It needs a Bible to 
reveal this, a Sabbath bell to call attention to it, 
public observances to give expression to it. Therefore 
the villages we live in, like the camp of Israel of old 
are built around the sanctuary dedicated to worship, 
hallowed with memories of the altar and of the cross. 
Without this our pilgrimage is aimless and the progress 
of the world is at a standstill. 



J 3 2 



Wagons and oxen or horses are as needful now as 
in the days of Libni the Gershonite, for drawing stone 
and lumber to build a church withal, and for hauling 
fuel to warm it in the winter. The sanctuary, now as 
then, is a visible sign that God dwells with men to 
sanctify their life and to bring them by way of it to a 
land of promise. 

Another thing. About all that the wild tribes and 
Sheikhs ever knew of the true God was learned from 
this peculiar people, who went thro their borders 
carrying the altar and a tabernacle. Some light and 
truth come to all men, but intelligent acquaintance 
with God and with the great facts of sin and salvation 
never has been and never will be found apart from the 
church of Christ. This is God's institution appointed 
to carry thro this world the visible insignia of religion, 
and to show in every day life its practical worth to 
men. 

To get the imprint of divine ideas firmly put on 
business, literature, politics, home life, pleasure or toil; 
to brighten men's hearts with holy hopes and aims, 
with sweet affections, sympathies and golden rules — 
this is what the church, the body of Christ is in 
this world for. Her temples adorn the land as they 
contribute to ennoble its life. Suppose the sky-pointing 
spires were shorn from our hills and vales. Not only 
would one fine charm of the scenery melt away, but 
common life would revert to paganism. Apart from 
the sanctuary there is no good land to be arrived at, 
nor any land kept good and wholesome, free from the 
blight of godless living. 

Third — Two wagons, four oxen. This means 
distribution of duty, and according to ability. For 

133 



A 



(Slit OTrnugljt Irtm 

in the next clause we come to four wagons and eight 
oxen. There's a reason for this. The curtains, cords, 
rings, ram's skins dyed red, all lighter stuffs, are in 
charge of the Gershonites with two wagons and four 
oxen. But the Merarites have to handle the boards, 
pillars, bars, silver sockets, heavy things, so for 
transporting these they have four wagons and eight 
oxen, twice as many. And besides, when it comes 
to the census it appears there are five hundred and 
seventy more Merarites to begin with. So we see the 
distribution of men, wagons, oxen, exactly fits the 
service required. This of course is not surprising; it 
is the familiar idea of division of labor for getting 
things done the best way. 

In this arrangement there's also lodged a principle 
of religion which God is very particular about. If one 
family has more wagons or oxen than another, more 
and heavier work is by that much expected. Here is a 
man who has twice the strength or ability or property 
of his next neighbor. What does that mean ? Twice 
as good a time in life ? Certainly, if he discover what 
that is, namely, the doubling of his responsibility, the 
privilege of giving twice as strong a lift in bringing the 
world up. This is what it means, tho some translate 
it otherwise. 

There are well-furnished and capable Merarites 
who instead of lifting on the timbers, slip over among 
the Gershonites and lend a hand on the curtains. It 
makes them feel good to be doing something in aid of 
religion. One of them said so, the other day, over in 
New Hampshire; he told the church treasurer it did 
him good to pay his one dollar a year. Perhaps it did 
him good to know that half a dozen Gershonites were 

'*34 



atom Havana, 3faur ©ot 

standing in every year for the other forty-nine that 
reasonably belonged to him. However that be, he 
soon left a pile of money to be quarreled over by a 
pack of greedy relatives. 

Money, skill, talent, education, strength, facility, 
position, are very convenient items to have ; we would 
like some ourselves; at the same time they bring 
serious obligations. One cannot turn his gifts or his 
holdings in upon his own center without loading 
himself to death, killing the best elements of manhood 
and missing his chance for distributing good. There 
have been those who reckoned it a smart thing to grab 
and hold on to all that could be gotten, to go rough 
shod over all considerations of courtesy or generosity, 
to live indulgently and stingily, shirking their share of 
the service of the world. 

Now there's an old rule that says where much is 
given much will be required. The equity and felicity 
of this is transparently clear. Moreover God will 
abide by it, and at the judgment he will reckon with 
every man according to that which he received. The 
Merarite with his eight oxen cannot be let off with the 
light load of the four-ox Gershonite. 

But what about the Kohathites? To them, it 
says, he gave none, not one ox. Having neither 
wagon nor ox what can the Kohath man do? Now 
that is easily answered. Some things are too delicate 
or sacred to be loaded on to wagons. It was not 
allowed that the ark of God could be carried on a 
cart. That and the seven-branched candlestick and 
the little gold altar of incense and the choice vessels of 
the holy place were given to the Kohathites to be 
carried by hand. The fitness of this arrangement any 

'35 



®ip OTrnuglji Irim 

one may appreciate. I saw heavy teams hauling up 
the stone and timbers that went into this church 
building, but the pulpit Bible, the silver cups and 
tankards of the communion service were brought in 
by hand and reverently put in place. 

Any day we may see what nice adaptation God 
makes of capabilities and duties. What one shall do 
appears in what one has to do with. I have known 
of one sending two horses and a carriage to take an 
invalid out into the summer air. And I have known 
one who didn't own so much as one horse to come 
into a chamber and with two hands lift a sick man. 
Which of these two did the best ? Each did what each 
could; nothing could be better. 

Not one ox had the Kohathite, but a hand, or two 
hands, as you and I have. I would rather have one 
hand than a dozen oxen. It is never far one has to go 
to find it and nothing could be handier for doing 
things. This old ox story and every word of our holy 
Bible was written by hand— not for pay, either. All 
the fine and practical arts that uplift or adorn man's 
life are of the hand, and so is the supreme art that 
Jesus taught, of doing good. For the most delicate 
ministries of Christian love there is no other tool. 
Better than plenty of good talk is a firm hand stroking 
the palm of a poor sick body. It needs only an 
ordinary hand for a good share of all the Christian 
service that is to be distributed, such as giving a hearty 
handshake or writing kind letters, relieving pain, doing 
a good turn at the neighbor's, making gifts, helping 
children, laying the dead to rest. The Kohathite has 
the happiness of lending a hand and being universally 



i 3 6 



atom Hasans iifaur (§xm 

useful. There is never a time nor place where a handy 
person isn't wanted. 

Fourth — Two wagons, four oxen. This brings in a 
discipline of doing things with rigorous exactness. 
The rules are strict, no variation is allowed, no 
opportunity for individual initiative nor for improved 
methods. 

That tabernacle must be taken down, packed, 
loaded on to wagons, transported, lifted off, put 
together, set up again, according to a rigid method 
that will be in force for some forty years. Any 
variation of this order will be fatal. Disciplines of 
this sort are more familiar now than they were then. 
Military skill and naval power are built on discipline. 
The traveling circus has one good show, namely, skilled 
method in taking down, loading and transporting its 
unwieldy paraphernalia. The pattern of which, I 
incline to think, may be found in an old book 
containing some reputed mistakes of Moses. 

Now the proposition in Moses' time was not simply 
to get the people thro the wilderness, but to get them 
soundly disciplined on the way. Consequently things 
were laid out very minutely and exactly, and the 
specifications must be followed to the last particular. 
Thus the driving up of a Gershonite ox and the folding 
of a badger's skin, whether badger or porpoise, came 
to be work with religious precision and purpose in 
it, as genuine to a degree as tho it were priestly 
ministration at the altar. 

Take it now in our own case. What is the main 
thing? simply to get thro all right? No. But to 
secure as we go along, the disciplines of life by all 
the miscellaneous occupations we are in. God has 

137 



®lp> ilnmgfjt Irtm 

measured out six-sevenths of our time for worldly 
affairs as we call them ; for all our work, as it says in 
the commandment. By this does he intend to make 
us six times as worldly as we are religious? Some 
folks manage to get that result out of it. 

But the proposition is, religious discipline by way 
of every day work. At the fore front of the week God 
has set his holy Sabbath, The sacred stimulus of that 
day is to penetrate and hallow the entire miscellany 
of the other six. All the long while that we are not 
going to meeting he is training us by the every 
day routine. Dull and monotonous and uninteresting 
enough is the inescapable string of small chores, and 
we think we want no more of that sort. Yet as in 
those old times of wagons and oxen, so now — we 
get our training into habits of patience, carefulness, 
precision, co-operation, a right spirit and an open 
testimony to him as our Master, this very way. The 
arrangement could not be improved upon. God has 
made the daily tasks a necessity of life, we are to make 
them a necessary item in our religious education. 
Coming to them with a docile mind we shall get 
character drill in the process of keeping store, farming 
land, running machinery and cook stoves, doing school 
lessons, handling cattle and teams. 

Some years ago a lad was sent to the hay field 
with an ox team. Going thro where the bars were 
down he geed the cattle too far, struck the off- wheel 
on the post and brought it down. Did the farmer 
whose orders he was under, take on about the injury 
done? On the contrary he set the boy driving back 
and forth thro that opening till he could take an ox 

i 3 8 



atom Ha$0tts, Jfaur (§xm 

team into any field without hitting a post. Keep at 
it, sir, he said, and don't you stop till you can do it. 

What was the main thing in the mind of my sturdy 
grandsire that day? Was it to save something on 
fence posts ? I may have thought so then, but now I 
plainly see it was to train the boy. Nothing else but 
that. Two oxen and a cart, and — at it sir, till you can 
doit. 

At it, we may say, is the order that is on us all, in 
the midst of our daily tasks. At it, till out of all this 
homely work we have gained our training of heart as 
w r ell as of hand. It is in the workshop of common life 
that we work out our part in salvation. There's only 
one way of doing anything; our Saviour taught us 
that way, doing all things to please the Father. This 
weaves a spiritual quality into the process — all the 
same whether immediate results suit us or plague us. 
His tool slipped, says one who was observing a 
mechanic, and the work was spoiled. Then his face 
flushed with anger, the old impulse to swear started 
up, but instead, he firmly bit his lip and began again. 
That was a spiritual victory won at the bench. And 
there isn't a day of our lives that does not bring us to 
some little matter which straightway gets importance 
as a pivot on which we turn rightly or wrongly. 

We ourselves come to be what our average daily 
work in life makes us. We think we do things and 
there's an end of it. Not so. These very things as 
we did them did something in turn for us. They 
contributed to the making of the man who did them. 
Did William of Wykeham build this tower of Windsor 
Castle? Yes. And into it he set the lettering — this 
made William of Wykeham. The building of it was 



!39 



©fj? Urcugtjt ®rtm 

part of the building of the man. It cannot be 
otherwise. Whatever is done conscientiously with a 
main purpose of pleasing God is more than so much 
done. It enters into ourselves, becomes part of our 
spiritual structure; we take it with us into next year, 
into next millennium. We carry over into the next 
world just one finished product of all our days' works 
here, viz., disposition, ways, methods, habits, motives, 
character-marks, all of which were acquired while we 
were about our affairs, not suspecting how they were 
quietly touching us into shape. 

Fifth — Two wagons, four oxen. To get the best 
out of them, turn them, when occasion calls, to the 
public service. Even for his own advantage this is the 
best thing one can do. 

How was it with Jobab and his ox ? Unless that 
tabernacle is carried thro all right, he will never see 
the good land, his children never will. He must hitch 
his team into the public service, take his share of all 
common obligations, or else he will miss his chance. 

This is about the last thing that some people think 
of. Their lookout is for a good seat, a comfortable 
ride. Here is a sleek man of Naphtali coming along. 
He sees the wagon standing ready to start, and he 
says — a fine arrangement. I'll just get in. He might 
get in. How far would he get on toward Canaan's 
milk and honey? Plenty of people today are taking 
rides — where to ? Not straight up to the gate of the 
city I fear. Riding along the boulevards of ease or of 
show, going smoothly or swiftly over any bright way 
that makes life an entertainment chiefly, cannot bring 
one out at a desirable terminus. 

The one man who did have a chariot ride to 



140 



©too Hagona, 3mx (®xm 

heaven got it without expecting it. All he planned 
for was to go footing it up and down the country, 
doing errands for God — giving some plain talk to a 
king, or replenishing a poor widow's meal barrel, or 
walking along with a man till the Lord took him up. 
Not even by laborious commandment-keeping can we 
make such upward progress as by quietly helping 
somebody along. The young lawyer who had kept 
all the commandments from his youth up had "a 
well-built turnout. If one could ride to eternal life 
on any carriage of his own making, here was a 
passenger. Even the Saviour as he looked found 
something to admire, but pointed out the defect in the 
vehicle and the young man alighted and went away 
sorrowful." What was the matter? This was the 
matter — he had no heart for the suffering world; his 
riches all went in upon himself and choked him. 

On the other hand we have the story of a 
Samaritan who set the battered Jew on his own 
beast while he trudged along on foot. This might 
pass for a bit of entertaining fiction except that fact 
was back of it. That very day the wheels of the 
universe waited the bidding of a Man who preferred 
to go about on foot distributing sympathy and 
lending a hand. And so deeply went the gentle push 
of his example, that now, after long while, good 
Samaritanism is not only good form, it is the veritable 
autograph of the church and sign of the new earth 
that is to be. 

Two wagons, four oxen. Whether it be an 
ox or an ass, an old cart or a surrey, millions of 
money or only a pair of hands, the public service needs 
the one full share each one can render and only so will 

141 



Stp> Uroagiji Irtm 

he get the good of what he has. Orderly society and 
business prosperity rest on the foundation of sapphires 
that Christ laid. Religion puts property values up. 
It is money in my pocket, said a man, to pay for church 
work in my town. Truly so— not surpassingly heroic 
as a motive, but the bent of some minds is such that 
it fits their case. The ox of Reuben and the wagon of 
Dan will go below par if not put to their share of the 
service of religion. So with everything else. 

I like the straight logic of the Basuto lad who 
drove the missionary team. Sir, said he, those oxen 
are the Lord's, it's my work to keep them fat and 
strong to pull the gospel wagon to Bani-ai-land. 
That's why I need a warmer coat for these cold nights 
and days. 

Sure enough. Even the coat I put on is something 
more than an up-to-date garment, it is part of my 
furnish men t for the daily service of life. It does more 
than fit well or make me comfortable; it dresses me to 
be abroad with some everyday good for somebody. 

Nothing gets its full value till it is coupled to a 
larger service than any one life compasses. Practical 
generosity makes values. Even a child can learn this. 
I saw a little boy holding out his stick of candy for 
another boy to have a bite at; he might have 
swallowed all that sweetness off by himself in a 
corner; as it was, he quite unconsciously three-folded 
its value by making two boys happy also the man who 
was looking on. He was on the way to learn the 
meaning of a familiar couplet, 

" Who bestows himself with his alms feeds three, 
Himself, his hungering neighbor, and me." 



142 



atom MagottB, iflour ($xm 

No sooner were the five loaves broken and distributed 
than their value advanced several hundred per cent. I 
wonder if the villager in Bethphage ever suspected 
what a valuable colt he owned ? Not till he loaned it 
to One who had need of him and was worthy of the 
best ; from that time on this little donkey has lived in 
the affections of man, and figured quaintly in the 
world's immortal pictures. 

Many generations have passed and the ways of 
traffic and transportation have changed. In these 
days we are waited on by the parlor car and the 
lightning express. But those ungainly carts of the 
desert and the slow-going oxen that pulled them 
along, comfortably chewing their cuds between whiles, 
may be said to be still in the service — leading our 
thoughts along homely paths of truth, figuring to us 
the imperishable value of things, of lives, dedicated to 
the will of God and to the good of men. 



H3 



^rattrfflrmaium 



Transfigured. 

Matthew, xvii: 2. 
Transformed. 

Romans, xii : 2, 
Changed. 

I. Corinthians, iii : 18. 
1879. 



w 



©ransformattntt 



UR theme is in one word. Not a compact Bible 
monosyllable this time, but a large word of 
large unfoldings; a word that may be said to 
hold in itself the spiritual progress of the world. 

Singularly this word found its way only three 
times into the original, and then came over into our 
English Bible as three different words. So that, Jesus 
was said to be transfigured, the disciple transformed, 
the disciple also changed spiritually. And these three 
words, originally one — metamorphoo — marked a 
transfiguration of body, mind, spirit; interesting as 
a theme, supremely important as a fact. 

Now in our thought this great word transfiguration 
stands for some superb mystery, like that on the high 
mountain. But in reality, the thing itself, in all manner 
of ways, is common enough. It is an everyday occurrence 
like the sunlight. Like sunlight too, none the less 
wonderful for being common. What is this flushing 
of the hemisphere with out-streaming light of the 
morning but the transfiguration of the face of the 
earth? One wouldn't guess that the ground, gloomy, 
expressionless, uninteresting at midnight, could ever 
take on such illuminations of variegated beauty as play 
upon its features at the touch of the rising sun. 

*47 



More surprising still are some changing aspects of 
things familiar to us in daily life, but not always set 
out before us in their full meaning. Take any one 
thing. Here for example is a bucket of water. The 
horse has drunk what he wants of it, now the driver 
rinses off the wagon wheels with the rest of it, and 
that's the end of a bucket of water. The end? No, 
not of that, nor of any pail of suds or slops running 
off in the sewer. This is water. Before God makes an 
end of it he will show us what water is. 

So he strains it thro his earth-filter, takes it by 
subterranean runaways to an outlet, bubbles it over in 
a brook, sends it rippling down into a pond, lets his 
evaporating machinery work upon it, and then begins 
to show us what he can make out of a pail of water 
more or less. 

He whirls it in scuds of white mist across the blue. 
He rolls it up in thunder clouds black as night. He 
flushes it with seven colors bent to his mighty bow. 
He turns it into plunging Niagaras, into Yosemite 
bridal veils. He uses it for diamonding lawns, for 
sharpening icicles, for painting ferns on window glass. 
He packs it into sapphire blocks that men cut and put 
into our refrigerators, or hangs it on the shoulders of 
the hills in folds of drapery whiter than any fuller on 
earth can whiten. In the morning he sends it down 
for a shower bath, at evening he piles it in bulk on the 
west horizon and commands the sun at his going down 
to look thro it — so that for a moment we may see his 
golden chariot, the rings and wings and cherubim of 
his pavilion, the vanishing splendors of the New 
Jerusalem. 

This is water. We use it or see it every day, at the 

148 



Sratts&rmattntt 

morning bath or the muddy street crossings; but just 
what it is we have not seen in fact till we have traced 
it thro the cycles of its beautiful transformations. Pure 
water, however, as in a tumbler on a hot day, might 
seem to us capable of large possibilities. But not so, 
we would say, with other, cheaper things. 

Well, then, we will look at something as cheap and 
unlike water as common dirt. Take a handful of dirt 
from the edge of the roadway or garden. Mr. Ruskin 
has told us in his chapter on the Law of Help how to 
watch it and see what it will do, conditions favoring. 
Part of it grows white and smooth and comes out a 
porcelain cup. Part of it sets into firm stone that 
takes only the blue ray, and that is a sapphire. Part 
of it whitens and hardens into parallel layers that 
flash out red, purple, green and blue; that's an opal. 
Another part, blackest and sootiest of all, comes out 
by some magic of nature's laboratory a diamond. So 
instead of a lump of dirt you have a porcelain cup with 
sapphires, opals and diamonds. 

Transformation indeed. Could anything on this 
round earth be more of a marvel? Yes, very much 
more. For what are we ourselves in bodily frame 
but dust lifted up from the ground, transfigured into 
fine and intricate machinery of life? Look at this 
earthy material, the dust that we shake off our feet — 
look at it again after God has cleansed it, transformed 
it, built it into a house for the spirit to live in. Thus 
we see what common dust can come to. But even 
this is not the limit of its possibility. 

Out yonder above Caesarea Philippi what is that 
shining figure on the mountain — exceeding white 
and glistering? That, too, is common dust of the 

H9 



SJIj? Wrnugljt Irim 

ground, transfigured, sublimated. It is the body of 
a Galilean made luminous by some chemistry not 
known in our laboratories. It is a spectacle seen for 
one rare moment, a hint, perhaps, of what this earthy 
might readily become if under full dominion of the 
spiritual. 

And this is the outlook of our theme toward which 
we have been creeping up. If, starting in the very 
dust of the earth, we find things capable of such 
transforming, perhaps we may look for like surprising 
changes in the sphere of spirit— transforming thought, 
affection, will, character. 

That is just what we do find. There is a man 
going up a tree in Jericho. He is fraudulent, tricky, 
stingy. When he comes down he is restoring fourfold 
and giving half his property to the poor. There again 
is a man on horseback. Look at him galloping thro 
Jerusalem gate raging and blaspheming. Look at him 
again, led like a child by the hand thro Damascus 
gate. Is he the same man? One wouldn't think so. 
The change from Saul to Paul was more surprising 
than the transfiguration on the mountain. That 
might perhaps have been expected. This never. Yet 
it did come to pass and has ever since. 

You may not need to go far any day to find it. 
Not long ago it happened again in one of our brisk 
New England towns where there's plenty of soot and 
dirt on the streets, plenty in common life too, without 
suspicion of diamonds hid therein. In that city was 
a lawyer, a man of position, of affairs, of brains; 
intellectually acute, openly a scoffer ; a man who had 
it out distinctly that he could live without religion, 
and when the end was arrived at he should die game. 



ISO 



SrattH&mtratum 

But a thing happened. There came over him a change, 
a spirit of docility, the simple religious faith of a child. 
The Christian life which formerly he had scouted 
became the supreme reality of his life, and all who 
saw him saw a man as it were transfigured, who 
with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the glory of 
the Lord was himself transformed into the same image. 

Well, this was a man of intelligence, perhaps it 
wouldn't be the same with one of the baser sort. 
Yes it would. Here is a child born into the third 
generation of a family of criminals; five times in jail 
up to the age of twelve; thirty-three years serving 
terms in prison, in Australia, Gibraltar, Old Bailey, 
Yan Dieman's Land, Moyamensing, South Boston, 
Montreal, Sing Sing; fifty-three years a criminal 
outlaw till one dark night he drifted into Jerry 
McAuley's mission. That night came a change. 
Michael Dunn went out to a new life. He was sober, 
worshipful, manly, earnest-spirited; a messenger of 
hope to profane, drunken, criminal men; he founded 
industrial homes in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, 
Brooklyn, Philadelphia; he lived for twenty years 
bringing sympathy and help to the worst people he 
could find, and all who looked on him saw what used 
to be a gloomy visage transfigured as with something 
from another -world. 

I think we shall agree that transformations like 
these are worth some close attention if only as 
phenomena to be scientifically analyzed and labeled. 
But a hundred-fold more as commanding events full of 
blessing for men. 

Not rare events either; these are but two out of 
twenty thousand, of all ages, all sorts, among all 

IS* 



races, in every zone or continent. Sometimes a 
dramatic experience — Augustine, Bunyan, John Newton, 
Gough, and Jerry McAuley. More often a change from 
outward correctness to spirituality of heart ; transfor- 
mation from a skeptical, self-centered, sour, cold or 
wilful habit of mind, to humility, faith, sincerity, 
reverence, gentleness, sympathy. 

Transformation like this can be wrought only by 
the Spirit from whom man's spirit came. It is the 
inmost response of soul to soul, of a disobedient son 
to a Father's love. Its full beauty may not appear at 
first glance. It needs a discerning eye to see every 
precious thing. You were not looking for a diamond 
in that pinch of dust, for a jewel soul in that plain man 
or woman passing by. In a wild Arabian wady I 
came upon a rounded pebble, it looked like any 
common stone on the Danville road, but the stroke of 
a hammer disclosed inside a pocket of a thousand 
crystals. That was an interesting find, but nearer 
home I have found under more than one plain exterior, 
qualities of soul which God's grace had polished and 
perfected wholly apart from the busy or cultured or 
fashionable world. %y 

The work of the Spirit in the new creation is not 
without surprises and picturesque effects as in the 
first creation reported to us in Genesis. There was 
the earth, waste and void, unsightly, darkness on 
the deep. But over it all the Spirit of God was 
brooding. Then out of that weltering mass came 
order, life, growth, summer bloom ; the primeval 
swamp is transformed into a garden. Tragedy and 
death coming in did not stop the process. Freshness, 
fragrance, loveliness are perenially unfolding above all 

I5 2 



the ravage of death. By the conflicts of nature-forces 
mingling with her nicely balanced harmonies, the Spirit 
of God is incessantly at work transforming things 
to things of finer grain and higher grade; dirt to 
diamonds, dry seeds to flowers, worms that crawl on 
sixteen legs to butterflies; wilderness and solitary 
places to rejoice and blossom as the rose. 

And this transforming of barren places spoken of 
by Esaias the prophet — what is it but a sign of the 
Spirit of love descending upon the wastes of man's life, 
brooding the troubled deep of human sin and wreck, 
to bring out therefrom a new creation of spiritual 
beauty. 

This, we say, is a world of sin. True, but more 
truly it is a world in moral chaos on the way to its 
transformation. The problem of the world is the 
making of man, and as to that 

" Man as yet is being made, and e'er the crowning age of ages 
Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape ? " 

It staggers us to think that the holy Creator 
ever let sin in; the depths of that mystery are below- 
all sounding lines of ours. But over against that 
unfathomable deep we are to fix our eye on one shining 
truth towering high in the distance — the redeeming 
purpose of Jehovah. This changes the whole aspect 
of things. Sin is still here, in the foreground, as 
dreadful as ever; but, farther on, redemption rising 
over the long perspective to the sky-line of God's 
eternal purpose. And we may most truly say that 
in the far view this is not so characteristically and 
impressively a world of sin as of redemption — of 
transformation from sin to God. To this all signs 



I 53 



®!p> Wrntxgifi Irtm 

have pointed, ever since the formless void felt the first 
faint thrills of light and coming life. 

When God would choose a place to put his name 
there for some characteristic display, what place 
should it be? 0, we might have answered easily 
enough — some fair spot unstained by man's iniquities 
or falsities, a virgin slope where lily-bells are swinging 
incense and the sky lark leads the chorus. Instead of 
which God selected the crag of Jebus, a fortress of the 
Canaanites red with blood of many fights, polluted 
with idolatries, a high seat of false gods. He chose 
that place that he might transform it from a fort to a 
sanctuary, from Baal abominations to Zion the place 
of his solemnities. 

This is God's way, the order of his redeeming and 
transforming grace. Verily not of angels doth he take 
hold for this, but of the seed of Abraham. He maketh 
choice of man's sinful heart to put his name there. 
He lifts the poor from the dust, the needy from the 
dunghill that he may set them among princes. Out of 
the clay of this corrupt world he gets crown jewels. 
A sinner converted is a sample of what grace can do. 

I should like to know what the enemies of religion 
would say about John C.'s conversion— said Daniel 
Webster: "In profanity and impiety he was the 
wickedest man in the neighborhood. Yet here he is 
today a penitent, humble, trustful believer. Whatever 
people may say, nobody can convince me that anything 
short of the grace of Almighty God could make such 
a change as I with my own eyes have seen in the life 
of that man." 

Mr. Webster's explanation was ample for all facts 
in the case. The change was great but not too great 



*54 



3ransformaium 

for the transforming touch of God. The evolutionary 
hypothesis had not then come into vogue, but even 
if it had, that virile thinker would be saying that 
nothing short of the grace of Almighty God could 
work the change that he had seen. 

Evolution is superb, but not soul converting. 
Profane men, godless nations, were never known 
to develop up into spiritual mindedness. They must 
first be transformed by the renewing of their mind. 
Paul is not a Saul developed to the tenth power. Zion 
could not have been evolved out of a Jebusite fort. 
The stone tracery of Salisbury Cathedral spire lifting 
the symbol of the cross four hundred feet in air, never 
spired up as a natural efflorescence from the Druid 
monoliths of Stonehenge. 

But when the missionary from Italy or lona 
came, and the heart of old Britain began to feel the 
transforming touch of God, then a new order came in. 
The weird Druid-chant died away and the solemn 
Te Deum rolled along the aisles; enlightened and 
converted England came to the fore front of the world. 

We are ready now to consider the part that falls 
to us personally in the transformations of life. For in I 
the sphere of spiritual effects there is this other limb to 
the hinge of turning; God's working must be matched 
by man's consent and co-operation, or the program 
cannot be carried out. It is a holy partnership. We 
are appointed to be workers together with God in 
making this a better world to live in. That appears 
even on the field of things. 

From the first the Creator set the hand and heart 
of man at work to complete in some details his own 
work. Transforming the fiery or frozen tracts of 

155 



®t}£ Wrought Snm 

Chaos and old night into an Eden was his solitary- 
act, but no sooner was the garden laid out than the 
finishing touches were committed to the man ; namely, 
to dress it, to keep it, to work his will upon it, to 
sanctify it by obedience and worship. 

Look at gardens nearer home than that. This 
New England that we love — how came it as we see it 
now ? On a time God lifted it out of the brine, ground 
it under glaciers, overlaid it with gravel and soil, robed 
it with forests. But the ultimate transformation he 
reserved for the hand and will of men, after his own 
heart. He brought the Mayflower pilgrims here. 
That was the signal for a new order. 

Then began the transforming of the wilderness 
into fruitful fields, villages, gardens, parks; with 
schools, colleges, libraries; with sweet homes and 
hallowed sanctuaries, where life is something more 
than squatting in a wigwam or shooting arrows 
or scalping men. Man's energies inspired of God 
have worked these results. The gloomy wilderness is 
clothed with glories of Lebanon and excellencies of 
Carmel and Sharon. 

In the common things that men do every day 
we may see a good share of energy going into 
transformations that adorn and elevate life. Very 
significant are these transformings of iron into 
machines, trees into houses and furniture, wool into 
garments, rags into paper, paper into Bibles, Bibles 
into life, life into life abundant and everlasting. 

I recall a question thrown out by one of the New 
York papers when Peter Cooper died — of what was 
Cooper Institute built? Of glue, to be sure. Bones 
and hoofs were rendered into glue, glue into gold, gold 

156 



Sransfnrmaium 

into popular instruction, and that into character, 
culture, ability, life-power. That is the transmutation 
of glue. 

By the skill of man the very refuse of the world is 
transformed into things nice or useful — street offal into 
perfume, sewage into market gardens, frowsy rags 
with scrap iron and slaughter-house filth, into brilliant 
dyes ; the universal nuisance heap of ashes, tin cans, 
bottles, bones, boots, papers, barrel-hoops, cinders, 
garbage of every sort, into electric light to lighten the 
world. 

The ultimate significance of such effects seems to me 
entirely plain. Out of common and even base material 
wrought upon by man's intelligence, by consecrated 
will, life is to be lightened and sweetened and beautified. 
God has ordained that this world shall be wholly 
transformed by means of the spiritual activities of men 
and women who have themselves been changed into his 
likeness. Apparently this is why we are in the world 
now, to help transform it before being translated out 
of it. Ye are the light of the world, said our Saviour, 
and as in the first creation, so now, the dawning of I 
light is the signal for transformations. The gloomiest 
backgrounds of heathenism are brightened with them. 

Lin Kin Shan, the notorious profligate of Hankow 
becomes teacher in the Christian hospital ; old Gw^ergis 
the robber chief, traverses the Koordish mountains 
with Bible instead of dagger and gun; the haughty 
Brahmin Haripunt is changed into a lowly minister of 
Jesus ; Afrikaner fierce as the Gadarene demoniac grows 
gentle as a girl; Kapiolani, imperious and passionate, 
proud daughter of a race of barbarian kings, rules her 
people twenty years with Christian courtesy and love. 

157 



Wc\t Urnuglft Iran 

Lift tip thine eyes round about and see — all things 
are changed. Instead of cannibal ovens the goodly 
sanctuaries of Jehovah. That hideous stone Vatu-nin- 
Bokola, where heads of men were beaten into jelly to 
propitiate the demons, is turned into a baptismal font. 
There are the war spears of Rurutu framed into a 
pulpit balustrade. The dreaded and devil-haunted 
island of Aniwa, touched with a mighty spell at the 
coming of John Paton, is transfigured to a gem of light 
on the bosom of the southern seas. 

Transformations like these are picturesque on the 
far field, but as character-changes they are essentially 
identical every where. For even under the veneering of 
a Christian civilization, there is the same old heart of 
man full of sin and self-will. Tomorrow morning's 
paper will let us know that this fair land of ours is 
not yet free of savagery, crime and beastliness. In 
every New England township we may encounter 
profanity, falsehood, theft or vice. To meet all this 
God has set his church in the midst to act as a 
transforming energy and influence every day of the 
year. Inspired and empowered by the breath of his 
Spirit we shall each contribute one personal touch and 
testimony to shape the public conscience and purify its 
life; till the all-consuming greed of men shall melt in an 
atmosphere of generousness, and 

" all men's good 

Be each man's rule, and universal good 
Lie like a shaft of light across the land, 
And like a lane of beams athwart the sea" 

transfiguring the moral landscape. 

We may shake our heads and call this quite too 
ideal for such a world as we are in. But unexpected 



rs8 



©rattBfbrmatum 

things in that direction have come to pass already 
since the night that Bethlehem shepherds saw a great 
light. It is worth while to ask who is at the head of 
affairs? The earth is the Lord's and the fullness 
thereof, and before he makes an end of it, he will show 
us what transformations he can bring out. Something 
of this he signified to the clear-eyed seers who caught 
visions of a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. 

We are not to wonder that this takes time ; great 
work always does. Slowly and patiently God worked 
upon this earthly ball, counting off many millenniums 
in transforming it from fire-mist to the garden spot of 
man's joys. Millenniums behind and millenniums to 
come will be none too many for changing a rabble of 
degraded humanity into the kingdom of God on earth, 
where his will is done as it is in heaven. 

A single life turning on the pivot of a changed 
will may seem quite suddenly transformed. But the 
unwieldy bulk of our huge perverse humanity pushed 
out along its wilful way by an age-long momentum 
of depravity, turns slowly. Nevertheless it is in the 
direction of its great change ; the day will come, for the 
mouth of the Lord hath spoken it; and we, like the 
elders, lift up our eyes and greet the prospect from afar. 

Not only so, but as servants of the living God we 
set ourselves to make it a reality in our little world of 
every day. We are to look for the best there is in 
ourselves and in other people, and coax it out for 
the good impression it will make. On the 26th of 
February, 1880, Mr. Hannay announced to the Royal 
Society that he had brought out a diamond in his 
laboratory. That was considered a great achievement ; 
but it was not so great as one that is within our easy 

^59 



reach, namely, to so direct and mix our influence as 
to win from its hiding place some flash of unsuspected 
goodness, and shape to permanent beauty some 
wayward life of man. 

It is possible for every disciple of the Lord Christ 
to put upon this world some touch of transfiguring 
grace after a fashion of his own. This, mingling with 
multitudinous others, will give the new tone and color 
to earthly affairs ; it will abide and come out in the 
great day like the lines of a sun picture on the plate. 

In that day shall the vilderness be as Eden, 
And the desert like the garden of the Lord. 

Therein shall be gladness 

And the voice of melody, 
For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. 



160 



Irautg nnh £>nblxm\txs 



Luke, ii-xxiv. 
1900. 



leaittg wxb ^ubltmitg 

/%J%N a spring day long ago and far from here a child 
1 1 (J was sitting on the hillside looking off. 

At a distance the snow crown of a solitary 
mountain rested against the blue sky; between the 
purple hills over which the sun sets flashed the bright 
waters of the sea; near by were green and flowery 
slopes and flocks of tame creatures contentedly 
nibbling the grass. 

What a beautiful world — he was saying to himself. 
How good the air feels. O this lovely sunlight full of 
singing birds. There goes an eagle, up into the sky. 
What is the sky — I wonder ? How pure and blue it is. 
How still. I wonder how far up it goes, and what 
there is beyond ? God is there, I am sure, up there in 
the heavens. 

Last evening on the house roof when the stars 
were so bright, I heard my mother say — thy mercy is 
great above the heavens, and thy truth reacheth unto 
the skies. How wonderful God must be. And he is 
good, too. The Lord is good to all, and his tender 
mercies are over all his works. So my mother says, 
and she knows. 

Yes, God is good. This beautiful world is his, and 
he made it. How the sea sparkles in the sunlight. He 

?6 5 



(Sift Wroastjt Irtm 

gives these pretty birds their wings. They do not have 
to spin as my mother does, but God takes care of them. 
lovely lily, how sweet you are. I do not think 
Solomon ever had a coat like yours. And God made it. 

How beautiful God must be. And he is good. The 
Lord is good to all. I love him, for he is good. Why 
doesn't everybody love God? 

He is our Father, too. So my mother says. What 
is that verse she taught me to say? Thou art my 
Father, my God, and the Rock of my salvation. Yes, 
thou art my Father, Lord, and I am God's child, the 
son of God. How beautiful that is. I will go down 
and talk with my mother about it. 

Now this child had a good mother. She was 
devout, discreet, modest; blessed among women. 
Some things she could have told her boy, surprising 
things that happened at the time of his birth. But 
it may be doubted if she did. She had a way of keeping 
all such things to herself, pondering them quietly in her 
heart. The Holy Spirit that overshadowed her once 
in a great mystery, also taught her to keep those 
things in her heart, not to spread them with her 
tongue. The Holy One born of her was truly the Son 
of God as none other ever was ; but so far as we may 
conjecture, he was to discover this, not by stories of 
a star in the East and carols of angels in the sky — but 
in the selfsame way that other children learn from the 
lips of their parents that God is a Father to them. 

So as he goes and sits again by his mother's side, 
asking deep questions, she would keep those marvellous 
things in her heart, and talk to him of common things 
in a way to make them bright with heavenly meaning. 

Yes, my son, she would say, we are God's children 

166 






ifeatrtg anil §>ablmuig 

in truth, as I have always told you, when we love him 
and do as he wants us to. The blue sky that you have 
been looking up into is his ; so is that great and wide 
sea. He made the mountains and the cedar trees 
where the stork builds her nest, and the rocks that 
make hiding places for the conies. These gay lilies in 
your hand, he clothed them, and he sent the sparrows 
that twitter on the roof. But you, my child, are of 
more value than many sparrows because you have a 
soul; you can know God and love him and call him 
your Father, and be the son of God indeed. 

Perhaps a sword of pain did pierce thro her own 
soul also, as she feared what this might mean for 
him in such a world as this when its full meaning 
would break upon him. But her duty now was to be a 
devout and faithful mother, instructing this opening 
mind out of the scriptures. And his duty now was to 
be an obedient child in the home, and all should see the 
beauty of the home-life he was helping to make. 

By way of obedience he was learning every day 
more about the Father, and when, some years later, 
his mother found him one day sitting in the midst of 
the doctors, hearing them and asking questions, all 
were astonished at his understanding. Already, at 
twelve years of age, he had found out what he was to 
live for — he must be about his Father's business. That 
would mean then that he should be in the temple a 
good deal, talking religion and theology and be done 
with tools and common things — would it? 

No, not that; at least not yet. If he is a true child 
of God he w411 go back and be a good child still in the 
home. He will be subject a while longer to his mother. 
So he keeps right on helping her as aforetime. He 

167 



Stye Wraugiji Brim 

takes up his tools and works in the carpenter's shop 
at Nazareth. He can draft a true pattern and fit the 
joints of his work snugly. He fills out an honest day's 
work. In all things made like unto his brethren he 
does the same kind of jobs that James and Joses do ; 
but in the doing of them he is continually saying in his 
heart — Father, truly I am thy son ; I will finish well 
the work thou givest me to do ; lo, I delight to do thy 
will, God my Father. And thus it came to pass that 
all people could see the beauty of faithfulness in a 
workingman's life. 

So he lives in the hill country village, quietly 
working, and increasing in wisdom and stature, and 
in favor with God and man. This appears to have 
been always a natural growth of intelligence and 
development, with nothing to attract special attention. 
For neither then nor long afterward did his brethren 
reckon him different from themselves; except as they 
saw in him a deeper thoughtfulness, a more serious 
turn of mind than they had, also a great fondness for 
the holy scriptures. They would speak of him, maybe, 
as being the pious one of the family, often sitting 
among the sparrows on the house-roof with the roll 
of the prophet Esaias or the Book of the Psalms in 
his hand. 

All thro those venerable scriptures which he loved, 
there rose in dim and varied form, shadows of One 
that was to come, with blessing for mankind. In his 
brooding thought these far-off outlines of one like the 
Son of God have a growing and beautiful fascination. 
Their picturesque imagery floats in upon his dreams, 
the beauty of the life they point to charms his spirit. 

Perhaps he is saying to himself— Why may not the 

168 



Braufg ani Subltmttg 

fulness of time be already come? Is not the world 
ripe for the appearing of the Lord's anointed? How 
I would like to be that holy one. What hinders that 
I live in holiness all the days of my life and do good 
among men, as if I were he? It is written that he 
shall bring good tidings to the meek and help to the 
poor and needy— and bind up the broken hearted and 
give beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning. 
How beautiful this is ! verily I would like to be doing 
such things alway. Yea, I will do them, as tho I were 
the Lord's anointed indeed. 

What higher, holier aim of life could anyone have 
than this — reverently held, trustfully followed, as the 
Spirit of God should lead? What surer witness of 
spiritual supremacy could there be than the solemn 
purpose to fulfil all that was written in Moses and 
the Prophets and in the Psalms concerning him who 
should bring salvation to men? Greater than signs 
in the sky over birth, or mighty works of miracle, 
would be the deep self-devotion of a soul to work God's 
redeeming purpose, to be his anointed Son among 
men. If, among a chosen and peculiar people, trained 
in the lofty examples of Abraham, Moses, Samuel, 
Elijah, Daniel, inspired by the poetry of psalmists 
and prophets, there should arise a youth who, with 
all intelligence and seriousness, resolves to live led of 
the Spirit as if he were the Lord's anointed, then, as 
Dr. Matheson has said, the most dramatic resolve on 
the stage of time has occurred. Here is the beauty of 
a holy ambition — before it comes to the finish it will 
surely mount up to sublimity. 

For this life must be in unbroken communion 
with God, holy and without spot; must fulfil all 

i6p 



Wqt JfamgJjt Inm 

righteousness to the last jot ; must prove its divinity, 
not by mere signs and wonders, but by doing all the 
will of the Father, till, with the going of the last breath, 
may be heard the victorious words— it is finished. 

In the volume of the book it was written of him 
— lo, I come. I delight to do thy will, God. That 
is more than consent, it is the ardor of sinking man's 
will in God's, saying, thy will not mine be done. This 
means a plan and experience of life known only to 
the Father, revealed only in the light of each day's 
unfolding. Of that da\^ or any day knoweth not the 
Son, but the Father only. As the Spirit leads, any 
day, anywhere, so will he follow, delighting to do 
God's will. Herein is the beauty of filial devotion 
and trust. 

One day he is led of the Spirit to the waters of 
Jordan. Many are there receiving the baptism of 
repentance. For this he is no fit candidate, he has 
no sin to repent of. But as a brother man he will 
suffer it to be so now as if he were numbered with 
transgressors. He will be as his brethren. And no 
sooner has he who knew no sin identified himself in 
this way with sinful men and for their sakes, than a 
voice from heaven certifies that he is the beloved Son 
indeed. 

Still he follows no path of his own, but the way of 
the Spirit who unfolds the will of the Father. That 
takes him out into the desert away from the men 
whom he is eager to work for — what can this mean? 
Presently he is hungry. What an opportunity this 
offers to show the power of the Son of God by turning 
these stones into loaves of bread, transforming the 
dreary waste into fruitfulness for himself and for 

I JO 



Ifeauftj ani gubltmttg 

hungry multitudes ! What an act of blessing to the 
world on the side of its urgent, every-day need ! 

But perhaps there is another side to be considered 
first. The question may be — is this what the Father 
wishes me to do ? He will give bread to the hungry, 
but chiefly by requiring them to work for it. And 
besides there's something that man needs more than 
the loaf. He needs the love, the favor, the truth of 
God; not to live by bread alone, but by every word 
and promise of God. I will furnish that first, and feed 
the multitude afterwards — this will be the will of the 
Father. 

Another day it is on a high place dedicated to 
religion. What an impressive thing it would be to 
throw myself down, falling confidently into the 
safe-guarding arms of the Father! What a testimony 
for God, in the presence of unbelieving people! Or 
would it rather be a display of rash will and 
presumption ? Is that to please the Father ? Nay, it is 
only self-will. 

Another day it is the splendor of leadership. What 
fascination in that. How beautiful to lead and rule 
the people to my one will ; to govern them righteously ; 
how much better for them to be under me than under 
ungodly Caesar. And that will declare that I am the 
Son of God. Or, will it — not? Does he wish a kingdom 
built after that manner? Is it not the meek that he 
will have inherit the earth ? Whosoever will be great, 
must he not be servant of all ? Lo, I am among men 
as he that serveth. Hereafter I will not talk much 
about being the Son of God ; it is better that I be known 
as the Son of man. The Son of man cometh to seek 



i 7 i 



and save that which is lost, not to make a name for 
himself. 

One day some men come up and say, Art thou he 
that was for to come, or look we for another? Go, 
tell John what things ye see and hear. The blind see, 
the deaf hear, lepers are cleansed, the poor have the 
gospel. When John heard all that, he saw that here 
was one who did not come to make a name for himself, 
but only to bring the love of God to men. He made 
himself of no reputation; he took on him the form of 
a servant; he humbled himself and became obedient 
unto all that his fellow men have to experience. 

Foxes had holes to nest in, but the Son of man not 
where to lay his head. He sat weary and thirsty 
at the well-side. He kept coming down the hill. 
Everybody else was pushing higher up. He was 
coming lower down, closer to suffering, struggling, 
sinful men. He ate with publicans and sinners, and 
talked with Samaritans. He took most care for the 
weakest, the poorest. It was the one worst off of all 
that he healed under the five porches. When they 
wanted him to hurry up to the ruler's house lest the 
sick girl die before he get there, he does not hurry at 
all toward the great man ; he stops and talks with a 
timid woman who didn't dare show herself. 

A voice was saying, Come unto me all ye that are 
weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. 
Throughout all their cities and villages he was bringing 
a gospel, and healing all manner of disease among 
people, and it proved to be for him only a descent yet 
lower down into the experience of suffering and sinful 
and unthankful humanity. Now is seen the sublimity 
of compassion. 



IJ2 



Ifeauig ani ^ttbltmttg 

Some said, he hath a devil and worketh by 
Beelzebub, prince of the devils. Others, who indeed 
knew him well, said, he is only the carpenter; everybody 
knows that he is only the Nazareth carpenter. They 
began to hate him and sought to destroy him. 

Did he lose heart in sorrow and in disappointment ? 
Did he wonder if perhaps he had assumed too much in 
making himself the Son of God ? Did he need to ask, 
whom do men say that I, the Son of man, am? Not 
for information, not for confirmation. Perhaps he 
would evoke a confession — thou art the Christ, the Son 
of the living God. It would do them good to say it, but 
he did not need it for himself. For their sakes he could 
go up just once into a high mountain and be 
transfigured. But his daily path continues downward; 
down beside the foaming lunatic; down to meet spite 
and jealous hate everywhere; down toward the deep 
horror of what he surely foresees must overwhelm him. 

For indeed this world wants no such Son of God as 
he. It wants a king, an army, a throne. It wants the 
splendors of royalty, the pomp of coronation. It wants 
mammon. His path lies the other way — down ; how 
is he straightened till he accomplish it! The Son of 
man goeth, as it is written, to suffer; to tread the 
wine press alone. Down each day a little deeper into 
the experience of conspiracies and malice and treachery. 
What sublimity of self-surrender. 

How far down from the bright hill-top where he 
sat, a child among the lilies! What a different world! 
Can it be that this is God's world ? the dreadfulness 
of the sin of it! Now is my soul troubled ; what shall 
I say ? Father save me from this hour ? But for this 
cause came I to this hour. When I said, lo I come, it 



*73 



Stye Hmugltf Irun 

was to do thy will, God; to finish the work thou 
shouldst give me to do. Father glorify thy name by 
giving strength to thy Son to finish this work. 

Down deeper yet into such mystery of woe that his 
sweat is, as it were, great drops of blood. Father, if 
thou be willing remove this cup from me; nevertheless 
not my will but thine be done. What sublimity of 
submission ! 

Up there on the hill slope of Nazareth the lilies toil 
not, neither do they spin, and under the eaves of the 
house where he sat with his mother, the sparrows are 
nested and their heavenly Father careth for them. 
Does he care for his beloved Son down here by the 
olive press now at midnight and a band of men with 
lanterns and torches creeping along to sieze him ? Here 
are depths of woe deeper down than anybody else ever 
sounded or can ever know. 

The one pure soul among men, who should have 
been cherished as the priceless gift of God — betrayed 
with a kiss, hurried thro mock trials, denied by the 
foremost disciple, scorned and scouted by the ministers 
of Jehovah's temple, made a plaything of the Roman 
soldiery, driven out the city gate, hung up between 
two thieves ! No wonder the sky grows black, and a 
cry goes up as if, for one awful moment, God had 
forsaken him. So dreadful was it to bear the sins of 
the world. So great the sublimity of suffering that 
day. 

And yet above all this woe, out of the anguish of 
defeat and dissolution, rises the triumphant note which 
never once wavered anywhere on the toilsome way 
from the flower fields of Nazareth to this ghastly place 
of a skull. At every step of that path of dedication to 

174 



the Father's will, he could say— I have finished, thus 
far, the work thou hast given me to do. Now in the 
act of bowing his head to give up the ghost, he can say 
with firm voice — It is finished. Father, into thy hands 
I commend my spirit. 0, the beauty, the sublimity of 
that triumphant finish. Dead on the cross ! Wrapped 
in linen and spice, lying on the cold stone of the 
sepulchre. 

ye heavens, bending blue and beautiful over our 
mortal years — is this the end of a life consecrated to 
God and to goodness? Lo, it is but the beginning. 
Whosoever humbleth himself shall be exalted. His 
name shall endure forever, all peoples shall call him 
blessed. 

For the sake of sinful men he humbled himself and 
became obedient unto death, wherefore God also hath 
highly exalted him, and given him a name that is 
above every name — Saviour. Going down with 
calm, firm step to the lowest depths of shame and 
pain for love's sake, he went on the way to the highest 
that heaven and earth can render of admiration and 
honor and love. Where is thy victory, grave? He 
is not here, he is risen! He is at the right hand of the 
throne of the Majesty on high. Having tasted death 
for every man and suffered being tempted, he is able to 
succor them that are tempted. Wherefore also he is 
able to save to the uttermost them that draw near 
unto God thro him, seeing he ever liveth to make 
intercession for them. 

Many generations have passed and new things 
have come into the world. But on the hill-slopes of 
Galilee the young lilies array themselves in beauty 
still, and sparrows flit about the house-tops of 

*75 



®lji> JInwgtjt Srim 

Nazareth just as when the mother and her son sat 
there talking about the Father who is good to all. 
From lands far away visitors come to see the place. 
What is it that attracts them ? Not flowery fields and 
birds, and people of today. But a pure life that 
unfolded here in modest simplicity and obedience — a 
life wholly dedicated to God, given to the last drop 
in love to men. 

Beauty and sublimity incarnated — a life without 
spot, a pure offering laid on the altar of love, both 
when he went about doing good and when he poured 
out his soul unto death, the righteous for the 
unrighteous, that he might bring us to God. 

Lilies are as bright as ever they were on the slopes 
of Galilee. The beauty of the landscape, the sublimity 
of snow-crowned Hermon is all there. But the beauty 
that broods like a heavenly spell upon the land is not 
from these. It comes from a life lived among those 
scenes in love and pain for our sakes. 

Light from that life lies on every path of duty that 
fronts us, illumines every experience of distress or 
need — and whether it be a child, a woman, a man, 
anywhere on this round globe, whose life is given like 
his to God's will, there it will be seen that filial 
obedience is still beautiful, and love that suffers for 
other's sakes is sublime. 



176 



A (EyrUmmra 



Opening Seals. White Horse and Conqueror. Pale Horse. 
Death and Hades. Kings. Wrath of the Lamb. Four Angels. 
Sealing the Faithful. Ki?idreds and Peoples. Seven Trumpets. 
Prayers of the Sai?its. Hail. Fire. Blood. Star Wormwood. 
Smoke of the Pit. Locusts. Apollyon. Angel and Book. Seven 
Thunders. Two Witnesses. Earthquake. Second Woe. Angry 
Nations. Red Dragon. Michael and Angels. War. Seven-headed 
Beast. Patience of the Saints. The Mark. Lamb on Bit. Sion. 
Harpers. New So fig. Wine of Wrath. Blessed Dead. White 
Cloud. Reaper and Sharp Sickle. Winepress. Sea of Glass. Vials 
of Wrath. Scotching and Blasphemy. Armageddon Unclean 
Spirits. Scarlet Beast. War with the Lamb. Babylon Fallen. 
Allelulia. King of Kings. Armies of Heaven. Angel in the Sun. 
Gog and Magog. Old Serpent. Bottomless Pit. Camp of the 
Saints. Lake of Fire. Great White Throne. 

1887 Revelation, vii— xx. 



A (Egrlorama 



^■TITLE, synopsis and material this time are 
IjL sensational. Note the fact that sensationalism 
of a high and serious type and for accentuating 
truth, has an accredited place in the teachings of 
religion. Sin, by its hideous outrages has shocked the 
moral sense; redemption was consummated with a 
shaking earth and a spectacle of suffering innocence 
hung up in the air from which the sunlight fled away. 

The series of Bible records includes such items as a 
flood, plagues of Egypt, blazing Sinai, wonder-workings 
of Elijah. And it rounds up with the most spectacular 
scenery ever spread before the eye of man's imagination. 

This is commonly called the Apocalypse or 
Revelation. I am looking at it now as we in modern 
times would look on a cyclorama which rounds the 
whole circle of events into a single piece with one 
grand consummation. Those mighty cartoons drawn 
by thehand of John unfold their graphic imagery before 
us on purpose to catch attention and make a vivid and 
culminating impression. 

What then do they mean ? As to specific events, no 
matter, main trend and aspects only are what we want 

i8r 



5% Urougtjt Srutt 

now. The interpretation thereof in detail will keep its 
deep secrets till a hand that holds the key to all 
mysteries shall take the scroll and open the seals 
thereof. 

But the trend and outstanding features are plain to 
see. On this cyclorama is surely pictured to us 
something of the course of things in this world. Not 
pivotal crises and far away events only, but the 
ever-present mingling of forces that make history and 
give it significance. These are moral facts, the same 
in all ages everywhere, as real and energetic in our 
common life today as ever they were or will be. 

The first principal fact to note is — antagonism, 
fight, continuous and desperate. The cyclorama of 
Gettysburg is tame by the side of this. What scenery 
of belligerent intent and encounter! See on the first 
panel, this figure of an armed and mounted officer going 
forth to conquer; then a pale horse bestridden by 
death. Across the field yonder a rout of kings and 
captains scurrying off to dens in the rocks. Swarming 
up in thick smoke — indescribable shapes led by one 
Apollyon, a destroyer. Two hundred thousand cavalry 
with jacinth armor and flaming brimstone. Then 
tumultuous battle and angry nations and panic and — 
what bulletin is that, suddenly out ? 
WAR in heaven: 

MICHAEL AND HIS ANGELS 

CONTENDING WITH 

THE DRAGON AND HIS ANGELS: 

To that far height this war-cloud discharges. All 
along, from the prancing into view of the white, red, 
black and pale horses to the great field of Armageddon 
and the hordes of Gog and Magog besieging the camp 

182 



A (Egrlorama 

of the saints, you see the fight breaking out, mostly on 
a grand scale — intelligent, close, desperate, deadly, 
long. 

Now what is it all about ? A grapple and tussle for 
power ? I do not see it so. Religion does not concern 
itself with power except as related to ideas. Its 
commanding word is not power but righteousness. 
Jesus did not choose kingdoms, but the will of God. 
This fight is for ideas — right against wrong. Between 
these two opposed principles there must be perpetual 
antagonism. 

That is what our cyclorama signifies for one thing. 
And the fight is nowhere nearly done yet. It is on as 
hard perhaps now as ever it was. We are thankful for 
these times of peace, but there is no peace, saith my 
God, to the wicked — no peace where unrighteousness is 
tolerated. There's fight whichever way we turn, inside 
of men and outside. The war-drum may not throb 
but the pulse of passion does. Cannon are quiet, but 
good and bad are in close clinch on a thousand fields. 

It has always been so. Enmity was announced in 
Eden, at the cool of the day. Moses and the prophets 
had their hands full fighting the bad ways of their 
times. I came not to bring peace, said the Saviour, 
but a sword. Into the field dashed the valorous 
knight who was before a blasphemer and persecutor, 
and his autobiography reads, I have fought a good 
fight. On the Lord's day, in a peaceful island of the 
sea, the long story of the world was outlined in this 
panorama of battle. 

But we looked for something very different. Didn't 
the choir sing from the night skies a song of peace on 
earth ? Praj^ where is the Prince of Peace ? 

4*3 



Sty* Wrouglft Srtm 

Just where he said he should be— setting men at 
variance. It could not be otherwise. The world was 
against him because his ideas opposed its popular 
ways. Whoever follows him will be at variance with 
every bad thing among men. That sets up fight, as it 
always has. Wickedness does not want to be rebuked, 
even by the silent presence of goodness. Aristides must 
be banished. As for Jesus, crucify him! Goodness, if 
there is any in the way, must be expelled. Put the 
church out ! If it won't go, then centuries of fight are 
before it and rivers of blood. 

None too belligerent are these cyclorama scenes 
of war against the saints and souls beheaded for 
the testimony they held. Yea, have we not heard of 
such things even nearer home? Nineteenth century 
weapons of slavery or of rum against the testimony of 
righteousness — what are they ? Mobs, imprisonments, 
outrages, incendiary fire, scourgings and slaughter. 
In every land the sun lights up today the old fight is 
still on over some new phase of the same old issues, and 
with every prospect of continuing for a long while yet. 

But we needn't go so far afield. The contested 
territory is not continents but hearts. Look at the 
one you know best. Is it a realm of smiling and 
perpetual peace ? Have you never discovered a law in 
yotir members warring against the law of your better 
mind? Did you never have a stand up fight with 
yourself, or, like a famous old fighter, have to say — 
the good that I would I do not, but the evil which 
I would not that I do. It may have been only a 
disinclination to take hold of what ought to be done, 
postponing the immediate duty ; or it may have been 
a lurking ill-propensity we wanted to be rid of, a bad 

184 



A (EgrUirama 

habit we proposed to toss off at our pleasure, till one 
day, marching stoutly up to it, we found ourselves 
returning in the way of Bull Run. 

Look at our cyelorama again and note for a second 
thing, how vividly contrasted the two sides are in 
aspect and bearing. In real life it is not always so. 
Except for the uniform you couldn't tell, maybe, which 
of two armies a man belonged to. Champions of 
righteousness do not include all the best looking men. 
There are plenty of sleek, well-favored scoundrels. The 
success of iniquity depends in part on the fair show it 
can make; those who fight for it get themselves up as 
respectable citizens and give out plenty of plausible 
reasons why all who are not religious cranks should 
train with them, or at least give them a fair chance. 

But on this pictured screen how is it ? Are we ever 
in doubt as to where any actor ranks? Is there any 
mixing of quality or balancing of worth between the 
sides? Never a bit. No shading off can be detected. 
The sides are as unlike as white and black, and what 
the character of any actor is can never be mistaken. 

On one side the figures are noble. The commander, 
who is a man, is magnificent. His regiments are 
uniformed in clean white linen. At intervals they 
appear with palms or musical instruments. They 
stand at the front without fault or guile, the name of 
God is in their foreheads. 

On the same side are other actors, not men, radiant 
in aspect and equipment. They wear sashes of gold. 
They swing golden censers. One is crowned with a 
rainbow. One stands in the sun. One carries the seal 
of the living God. Four stand holding back deadly 
winds from blowing hurt on righteous men. 

r*5 



Sljr Wtmxvfot Irtttt 

Look now at the opposite side. The type is 
very different. Death on the pale horse; swarming 
nondescripts, man-headed, long-haired, shaped like 
locusts, with stinging tails of scorpions; a great red 
dragon, pushing out ten horns and trailing a third 
part of the stars at his tail. And a seven-headed 
leopard starting up from the sea brine, and a two- 
headed beast going straight to do the red dragon's 
business — a business of blaspheming, juggling, lying, 
deceiving and slaughtering. Even the women forms 
are sharply contrasted. On one side the fair woman, 
star-crowned, standing in the crescent moon; on the 
other side the vile woman, mother of abominations, 
riding her scarlet-colored beast, decked with finery and 
drunk with cruelty and filthiness. 

These contrasted picturings do not need a skilled 
interpreter. They tell their own story. Good and bad 
are set unmistakably apart from each other. Between 
the two is a great gulf of difference. We always knew 
that sin was a disturber of the peace ; not always did 
we know the inner ugliness of sin nor the surpassing 
beauty of holiness ; therefore in this picture gallery the 
two are set off in startling juxtaposition. If men are 
not loyally righteous they are inwardly false. He that 
is not with the king is against him . 

It cannot well be otherwise — one is either obedient 
to his maker or disobedient. If disobedient, which side 
is he on ? We are apt to say that if he is very bad, he's 
on the bad side. How bad must he be to be very bad ? 
Suppose he's in a complacent mood and says, I'll take 
care not to be very bad. I'll be as near good as I can 
conveniently. In this transaction I'll cheat only ten 
cents, where I might as easily as not make a half a 

186 



A (Hgrlorama 

dollar. It is comforting to human nature to contemplate 
the sacrifice of forty cents for conscience's sake. But 
where does this man rank? is he loyal or false? is he 
honorable or a cheat ? is he a big cheat or a little one ? 
That depends on his avoirdupois. 

I will point you to a picture hung high in the East 
long ago. A garden scene ideally beautiful— a shapely 
hand taking fruit from the bough. What sylvan 
loveliness! What Arcadian simplicity! Do you see it 
so? You see it not so, but as the front vignette of 
every tragedy that has crushed the families of men. 
So far from being idyllic it is unspeakably calamitous. 
From this time on, what hideous doings, what 
outraging of innocence, what uprising of horned 
beasts in human shape, what brutality stalking up and 
down "red in tooth and claw with ravin." 

The outward devastations anybody can see, but it 
needs a spiritual artist to paint in true colors the 
landscape of the heart. Then it is seen that any 
tempter to evil is a venomous snake, and that any least 
disobedience lets loose the whole pack of beastly 
passions. A sign-board is up and it reads, he that 
committeth sin is of the devil. On that clear landscape 
the hireling shepherd is a wolf, and whoso hateth his 
brother is branded a murderer. Those natural brute 
beasts prowling around the edge of the field are 
despisers of government, and that washed sow going 
down to wallow in the mire is one who has dismissed 
the Christian life from his heart. 

The artist commonly paints that which he sees on 
the surface of things, searching always for beauty. 
The old masters of Bible times made a study of the 
inner shapes and colorings of the heart of man. 

,8 7 



Whatever they laid upon the canvas can be depended 
on as vigorously truthful, for their work was done 
under the solemnity of a divine commission, and it 
stands for our instruction in righteousness. 

A third characteristic of this cyclorama is the wide 
reach of it and the introduction of what we might 
call foreign allies. The field of action is chiefly this 
planet, but the operators are not all of them natives. 
Reinforcements are continually coming down, or up, 
as the case may be, from outside territory. Or a sort 
of parallel encounter is depicted along the firmament, 
now among the stars, or again at the crater of some 
underlying pit. 

Something similar we used to read in the old epics, 
and trained our eye to see above the heads of Hector 
and Achilles such spectres as helmeted Minerva, Mars 
brandishing the mighty spear, Bellona driving celestial 
war chariots. But then we knew perfectly well that 
all this was elegant Greek fiction. Is it also all 
fictitious in the spiritual scriptural epic ? Quite surely 
not. From beginning to end it is insisted that man's 
affairs are not clear of outside interference. 

The very front cartoon, in its few forceful strokes, 
shows there is a Sovereign of the skies ; also that he 
is man's ally in the garden against a subtle spirit that 
suddenly slips in from somewhere. From that time on, 
upper or lower powers are pictured as entering the 
field with comfort, cheer and help, or with damage. 
If Jacob is on the way to better life, lo, shining figures 
descending the mighty stairway, and a voice speaking 
kindly to him. If David has a mind to do wilfully 
there's some sort of a satan to set him on. Ahab's 
prophets get reinforcement by lying spirits; Elijah 

188 



A (ttgrlorama 

gets celestial transportation. If Job is mauled and 
peeled by invisible operators, Daniel is thrilled by the 
touch of one not a native nor a citizen of this planet. 
This is the earlier picturing. 

And on the graphic diorama that winds up the 
story, it is drawn with still firmer hand — heaven, earth 
and hell mingling operations in the same sign of 
the great zodiac. We have read of wrestlings with 
principalities and powers of darkness, but neither this 
nor the chivalry of the skies took shape in our thought, 
till these pictured forms stood out on the screen — 
huge, uncouth, devilish, spitting fire and malignant 
foam — or from the opposite quarter, spirits in brilliant 
aspect, swift, noble, strong, coming to reinforce a 
righteous cause. 

It stirred our souls to know that monarchs and 
foreign courts were eager spectators of our civil war, 
and might become participants, for the principles at 
stake were not bounded by this continent. Nor are 
they, nor any of the moral issues of man's life, bounded 
by the globe we are on. They run straight out thro 
all worlds. Purity, temperance, loyalty, truth, love, 
are in some fashion on the banners of Michael and 
Zephon; pride, subtlety, malice, fraud, figure as slyly 
or insolently somewhere else as here. This fact 
puts larger meaning on the great moral conflicts of 
history, and gives to every solitary act and effort of 
righteousness a sort of supernatural grandeur. 

Some people to be sure, wish to make away with 
the supernatural. The Saducees say that there is 
neither angel nor spirit. They allow that spirits good 
or bad are imaginary, that miracles are myths, that 
Jesus was a superlatively good man. But what gain is 

i8g 



this to anybody ? Is the world better off to be rid of 
all agencies called supernatural or extra-human? 

I, for one, do not like to think that all the damnable 
iniquities of this earth were aboriginally spawned out 
of the heart of man. It is some slight relief to think 
that he may have been beguiled by some subtle influence 
into bad ways, a victim rather than prime originator 
and manager of evil. 

Then too it would be a sorry day for man, if, in the 
depths of his disaster and guilt, he must abandon the 
hope of superhuman help. Sinful humanity will have 
no use for a Christ who must take back the 
announcement that he came from heaven to save the 
lost — who can no longer tell us that he will come again 
and all his holy angels with him to iudge the world. 
Verily this is what we will confidently look for in the 
final and just rounding up of things. 

" We believe that thou shalt come to be our Judge, 
We therefore pray thee, keep thy servants 
Whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood." 

Fourth — One other thing that stands clear on our 
sacred cyclorama is a well defined issue. Your eye 
sweeps over the tumultuous action, shifting scenery, 
thickening plot, and for a while it seems indecisive. 
At first the bad is rampant, aggressive, irresistible. 
It riots over earth with savagery of wild beasts; 
hunger, pain and death are in its trail, till souls of 
the righteous cry out from under the altar of their 
sufferings. What ! Is this merely pictorial ? Or, have 
we somewhere read how the best souls of earth have 
been set upon as if they were vermin — driven into 
catacombs, fed out alive to hungry lions, burned to 
death for holiday spectacles, slaughtered on Alpine 



ipo 



mountains cold, hacked to pieces, tormented with all 
sorts of blood-curdling implements, till — what wonder 
a "thin and thrilling cry from under the altar, how 
long, Lord, holy and true!" Is there a just God, 
and does he care for his suffering children ? 

Come forward now to another panel. What are 
these in white robes and whence came they? Why 
these are those same sufferers farther on. They are 
not defeated, nor extinguished. They have come out 
from their great tribulation. There they are, walking 
in white amongst the water fountains — there again with 
heraldry of palm and crown — there again with songs 
and alleluias — there again on the sea of glass mingled 
with fire, for thro fire they came — there again on dress 
parade with their mounted Leader, for this is the 
scarred and battered tenth legion of the armies of 
heaven. 

The world reported them whipped and put out. 
So it seemed, and the revelry of the world went on. 
But none were ever defeated who obeyed God rather 
than men. So it is painted on the great cyclorama. 
There they are, on the heights, victors, the van-line of 
all loyal souls of all time. I salute them with admiring 
gratitude. 

" I ask them whence their victory came ; 
They with united breath 
Ascribe their conquest to the Lamb, 
Their triumph to his death." 

How to be winners in life's battle is a practical 
question. It fronts us every day. Is there any well- 
defined expectation for each one man and for the 
cause of truth that he loves ? Look at the picturings 
again and see. At the front is a Leader, resourceful 

igi 



®lp> Itaugljt Brim 

invincible. In varying and impressive form he 
repeatedly appears on the scene inspiring admiration 
and courage. 

See him flashing into view with a countenance 
bright as the sun, at his girdle the keys of death and 
the under-world, for this is he who was dead and 
is alive forevermore. See him taking the armorial 
bearing of the lion of Judah — again under the emerald 
bow the aspect of a lamb wounded to death — again 
astride the white horse a conqueror — again leading 
his fellows among peaceful fields and fountains. There 
again high up, riding a swift white cloud, with golden 
sickle, to superintend the vintage of the winepress of 
God's wrath. Now 

"He is trampling out the vintage where 

the grapes of wrath are stored," 

and what do you see? Sixteen hundred furlongs of 
running blood from the winepress even to the horse 
bridles, and seven vials of wrath emptied on the 
persecutors of God's saints. Then what putrid sores 
break out upon them, what blood to drink, what 
scorching of blasphemers who gnaw their tongues in 
more blaspheming, what vomiting of unclean frogs 
from the dragon's throat, what mustering for fight at 
Armageddon, what downfall of arrogant Babylon and 
hurling of the beast into the lake of fire. Then on 
the plains of heaven the grand review, led by the 
commander crowned with many crowns, his vesture 
dipped in blood and lettered— King of kings, Lord of 
lords. 

Now it doesn't matter that we identify these 
hieroglyphics with any one group of events. They 



I 9 2 



A GJgrlm*ama 

may apply to a hundred for aught you or I know. 
Already many a time and after many a fashion has 
this illustrious Leader who on earth single-handed put 
temptation, sin and death under foot, executed the 
righteous judgments of the Almighty, smitten the 
nations with the rod of his providence, overturned 
great wrongs and brought peace to his people. If you 
doubt whether he ordered the march from Atlanta to 
the sea, you may be sure that he leads in person the 
march from Calvary to the sea — the sea of glass 
mingled with fire. 

It is millennium long and planet wide; you may 
trace the track of it by wrecks left along the way — 
fallen Babylons, dead cities and empires, fragments 
of old idolatries and rancorous bigotries, rusty 
implements of torture, martyrs' fagots, slave chains. 
All these had their proud day and were reckoned 
irresistible. It took long and desperate fighting to 
bring them low ; but goodness won at last and left 
them dead on the field, as we might say. No, not 
just that, after all, for the spirit of godlessness 
survives the wreck of one form and reappears in new 
shapes to curse each new age. 

Here it is again before our eyes flaunting its 
insolence in combinations whose shapes and colorings 
were laid on the cyclorama long ago. That ten-horned 
dragon, the saloon, ravages the land with effrontery 
and pitiless ruin; the scarlet-colored mother of 
abomination and filthiness nests the broods of social 
vice; the gambling beast like an octopus reaches out 
one sly tentacle after another to suck in the unwary ; the 
innocent-faced lamb-horned beast, a wolf in sheep's 



*93 



clothing, haunts a new-fangled Zion wherein polygamy 
is a standard ordinance of religion. 

Monstrosities like these are an affront to our 
civilization, a stench in our atmosphere. Earnest 
souled men and women are fighting hard to rid the 
land of their cursed presence and blight, to make them 
like Oreb and Zeeb, yea as Zebah and as Zalmunna. 
Others look on and say it never can be done. Not so 
the cyclorama, whose prophetic signals we are 
anxiously scanning. It has for all such, one bottomless 
pit, and the testimony of history is that its picturings 
do not fail, that righteousness wins on any field where 
Christ leads, tho ages are piled up in the process. 

The fight is on every day; we ourselves are 
in it with our appointed charge — real, however 
inconspicuous. If we could see the conflict in its true 
significance and coloring, it would be not a whit less 
graphic than those startling pictures display it. 

Look again. On this side— justice and honor, faith 
in God and reverence for his holy will, sincerity, an 
illumined and sensitive conscience, sobriety and purity, 
dutifulness, generosity, self-sacrifice, magnanimity, 
love. 

Look again. On that side— infidelity, bitterness, 
jealousies, spite, unhallowed and fiery passions, malice, 
lawlessness, subtlety and fraud, meanness, rapacity, 
the devouring and demonizing greed for money, self-will, 
blasphemy, irreligion. 

It needs only a little close observation to discover 
that these contestants are in perpetual grapple, on the 
wide field of affairs, or in the dim seclusion of a solitary 
heart, day and night in all the life of man. It looks 
very much as if this earth was constructed as a field 



194 



A (ttgrlnramct 

for the fight, dedicated to the solemn antagonisms of 
righteousness and sin. A spectacle altogether sublime 
when we are certified that right shall surely win, that 
simple goodness is to prove itself the supreme and 
victorious force in the story of the world. 

At Gettysburg, after four hundred cannon had been 
roaring for hours across the field, there came a lull. 
Then a song sparrow flew to a peach-tree on Cemetery 
hill and gave out a little trill of melody. 

" Which song is the sweetest where both sing well, 
The bird's or the bullet's— ah, who shall tell ? " 

One might say that above the smoke and carnage 
was a presiding Presence— in righteousness doth he 
judge and make war — who so distinctly marked the 
issues there pending, that he sent his little bird to sing 
a strain of peace when, for a moment, the cannon 
stopped their noise. 

Today, thro the land there is a lull in the roar of 
machinery, in the plunge and passion of competition, 
in the outward violence of irreligion. During the hush 
of this holy day we catch a strain of song from purer 
worlds — we sight the imagery that pictures to us the 
winding up of the long story. 

What report does it render? Lo, the dragon 
beasts and Gog and Magog hordes have all been 
brushed from the field like noxious insects into 
burning brimstone. The servants of the living God 
are with their Leader in white. High in the solemn 
background is the Great White Throne — 

"AlleluKa! 

For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth." 



I 9S 



ERRATA 

Page 188, second line. For vigorously read rigorously. 
Page 190, second line of stanza. For keep read help. 



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